Cultural values and interbank markets: An agent-based stock-flow consistent model

Abstract

Recent financial crises have revealed tensions in interbank markets, challenging conventional monetary policies and financial stability. After the sovereign debt crisis, shifts in banks’ funding preferences led to numerous issues in payment systems and European financial integration. Through this study, we analyzed the impact of firms’, households’, and bank managers’ personal values on their financial decisions in credit and interbank markets, highlighting how cultural differences influence financial choices$-$a critical factor that remains insufficiently addressed in the existing literature. To address this gap, we incorporated individual values into firms’ and households’ leverage attitudes and banks’ risk-taking behavior, thereby shaping interbank funding maturities and impacting monetary policy outcomes within an agent-based stock-flow consistent framework. The results of this study suggest the following: (i) value distributions featuring risk-averse banks and prudent households promote economic growth; however, they do so at the cost of increasing shock vulnerabilities; (ii) cultural diversity may challenge interest rate steering policies; (iii) imbalanced cultural distributions exhibit divergent speeds of adjustment and require tailored monetary policies to mitigate the disproportionate effects on culturally diverse economies.