Variable Mortgage Rate Pricing in Ireland
Abstract
This Letter examines movements in the interest rates charged on variable rate mortgages. The results indicate that variable rates for all lenders closely followed changes in the ECB's policy rate, short-term wholesale rates and tracker rate mortgages until the end of 2008. Thereafter, the relationship breaks down, in part due to banks' increased market funding costs. It appears that some lenders with higher mortgage arrears rates and a greater proportion of tracker rate loans on their books exhibit higher variable rates. After controlling for these additional factors, most of the divergence between banks variable rates is explained, but there are some exceptions. There is also some evidence of asymmetric adjustment in rate setting behaviour: that is, rates tend to adjust slowly when they are above the long-run predicted level but more quickly when they are below this level. This asymmetric adjustment behaviour appears to increase in the post-2008 period.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Central Bank of Ireland in its series Economic Letters with number 02/EL/12.Length:
Date of creation: Jan 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cbi:ecolet:02/el/12
Contact details of provider:
Postal: P.O. Box No. 559, Dame Street, Dublin 2
Phone: (01) 671 6666
Fax: (01) 671 6561
Email:
Web page: http://www.centralbank.ie
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords:This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-11-24 (All new papers)
- NEP-BAN-2012-11-24 (Banking)
- NEP-PBE-2012-11-24 (Public Economics)
- NEP-URE-2012-11-24 (Urban & Real Estate Economics)
References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- McCann, Fergal & McIndoe-Calder, 2012. "Bank Competition Through The Credit Cycle: Implications For SME Financing," Economic Letters 04/EL/12, Central Bank of Ireland.
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cbi:ecolet:02/el/12For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (James Kavanagh).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

