A Threshold Cointegration Analysis Of Interest Rate Passthrough To UK Mortgage Rates

This paper empirically analyses the interest rate transmission mechanism in the United Kingdom by exploring the pass-through of the official rate to the money market rate and of the market rate to the mortgage rate. Potential asymmetries, due to financial market conditions and monetary policy, lead to the use of a nonlinear threshold error-correction model, with hypothesis tests based on non-standard bootstrap procedures that take into account the discrete nature of changes in the official rate. The empirical results indicate the presence of substantial asymmetries in both steps of the process, with these asymmetries depending on past changes in the money market rate and whether these are motivated by official rate changes.