Bank of Lithuania
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No 43
2022-05-20

What drove the rise in bank lending rates in Lithuania during the low-rate era?

  • Abstract

    While Euro area interest rates were responding to accommodative monetary policy and decreasing throughout 2015-19, in stark contrast, Lithuania’s bank lending rates increased. Although the rates have slightly dropped around the onset of the pandemic, they are still elevated and well above the EA figures. This paper calls into question, what were the drivers of such interest rate dynamics in Lithuania? By analysing the historical events and practical aspects of loan pricing in Lithuania’s banking industry, we build an empirical model that exploits lending rate variation across banks, time and lending segments, and maps it to different drivers of pricing. We find that the recent changes in lending rates can be attributed to average bank margins, which moved largely in response to changes in market concentration.

    Keywords: interest rates, loan pricing, banking, concentration, capital requirements.

    JEL Codes: D22, D40, E43, G21, L11.

    The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of Lithuania.

     

     

No 42
2022-04-12

Housing and credit misalignments in a two-market disequilibrium framework

  • Abstract

    During the Covid-19 pandemic, house prices and mortgage credit are growing at a long-unseen pace. However, it is unclear, whether such growth is warranted by the underlying market and macroeconomic fundamentals. This paper offers a new structural two-market disequilibrium model that can be estimated using full-information methods, and applied to analyse housing and credit dynamics. Dealing with econometric specification uncertainty, we estimate a large ensemble of the two-market disequilibrium model specifications for Lithuanian monthly data. Using the model estimates, we identify the historical drivers of Lithuania’s housing and credit demand and supply, as well as price and market quantity variables. The paper provides a novel approach in the financial stability literature to jointly measure house price overvaluation and mortgage credit flow gaps. We find that by mid-2021 Lithuania was experiencing a heating in housing and mortgage credit markets, with home prices overvalued by around 16% and the volume of mortgage credit flow being 20% above its fundamentals.

    JEL Codes: C34, D50, E44, E51, G21.

    The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Bank of Lithuania.