Interest rate liberalization in China intensifies the exposure of commercial banks' interest rate risks and further increases the difficulty for commercial banks to effectively control interest rate risks, thus putting forward higher requirements for the normal operation and management of commercial banks. With the development of China's financial derivatives market, banking institutions begin to use basic interest rate derivatives to hedge interest rate risks. It is very important to give full play to the maturity transformation Function of commercial banks to enhance the ability of financial services to the real economy. Based on the semi annual unbalanced panel data of 37 listed banks in A-share stock markets from 2006 to 2020, this paper empirically tests the impact of the use of off balance sheet interest rate derivatives on the Maturity Transformation Function of banks in the case of interest rate fluctuations. The empirical results show that: (1) the use of interest rate derivatives helps to weaken the negative impact of interest rate fluctuations on the Maturity Transformation Function of banks. (2) The analysis of the mechanism shows that the use of interest rate derivatives improves the stability of the bank's asset side term structure and liability side term structure, so as to support the effective play of the bank's financial intermediary role. (3) Further analysis shows that the of interest rate derivatives significantly reduces the volatility of bank earnings. This study makes it clear that the use of interest rate derivatives has a positive impact on the commercial banks, which provides evidence for the further development of interest rate derivatives market in China.

Our study is the first to examine the effect of policy instability on interest rates. China offers a natural setting for the experiment because financial market liberalization policy flip-flops recur. When a policy is reversed, interest rate level and spread can increase or decrease in the interbank repo market. Accounting for the bureaucratic quality of policymaking, we find that the nonpredictable, non-credible and non-timely reversal of an existing policy is related to higher interest rate spread and volatility, which represent higher risk premia in interest rates. Conversely, predictable, credible and timely reversal is related to lower interest rate spread and volatility. Our results suggest that bureaucratic quality is a moderating factor and high bureaucratic quality can reduce the risk premia of policy instability being priced in interest rates.