Search Results
Report
Banks' reserve management, transaction costs, and the timing of the Federal Reserve intervention
We use daily data on bank reserves and overnight interest rates to document a striking pattern in the high-frequency behavior of the U.S. market for federal funds: depository institutions tend to hold more reserves during the last few days of each "reserve maintenance period," when the opportunity cost of holding reserves is typically highest. We then propose and analyze a model of the federal funds market where uncertain liquidity flows and transaction costs induce banks to delay trading and to bid up interest rates at the end of each maintenance period. In this context, the central bank's ...
Report
The execution of monetary policy: a tale of two central banks
The Eurosystem and the U.S. Federal Reserve System follow quite different approaches to the execution of monetary policy. The former institution adopts a "hands-off" approach that largely delegates to depository institutions the task of stabilizing their own liquidity at high frequency. The latter institution follows a much more "hands-on" approach involving daily intervention to fine-tune the liquidity of the banking system. We review the implications of these contrasting approaches, focusing on their impact on the high-frequency behavior of very short-term interest rates. We also examine ...
Journal Article
How economic news moves markets
Exploring how the release of new economic data affects asset prices in the stock, bond, and foreign exchange markets, the authors find that only a few announcements - the nonfarm payroll numbers, the GDP advance release, and a private sector manufacturing report - generate price responses that are economically significant and measurably persistent. Bond yields show the strongest response and stock prices the weakest. The authors' analysis of the direction of these effects suggests that news of stronger-than-expected growth and inflation generally prompts a rise in bond yields and the exchange ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy in pre-ECB Italy
In 1979, Italy entered into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) as a founding member of the European Monetary System. After that date, the country's monetary policy was geared toward the maintenance of exchange rate stability against its ERM partners, despite a number of exchange parity realignments and with the exception of the period from September 1992 to November 1996. The strength of the ERM commitment was not uniform over time, either in terms of amplitude of the fluctuation band or in terms of frequency of realignment of bilateral parities. Despite this variability, however, changes in ...
Report
Excess volatility of exchange rates with unobservable fundamentals
We present tests of excess volatility of exchange rates that impose minimal structure on the data and do not commit to a choice of exchange rate "fundamentals." Our method builds on existing volatility tests of asset prices, combining them with a procedure that extracts unobservable fundamentals from survey-based exchange rate expectations. We apply our method to data for the three major exchange rates since 1984 and find broad evidence of excess volatility with respect to the predictions of the canonical asset-pricing model of the exchange rate with rational expectations.
Report
When liberal policies reflect external shocks, what do we learn?
We present a model where policies of free capital mobility can signal governments' future policies, but the informativeness of the signal depends on the path of world interest rates. Capital flows to "emerging markets" reflect investors' perception of these markets' political risk. With low world interest rates, emerging markets experience a capital inflow and engage in a widespread policy of free capital mobility, whereas others impose controls to trap capital onshore, thus signaling future policies affecting capital mobility. These predictions are consistent with the recent experience of ...
Journal Article
Intraday trading in the overnight federal funds market
Transaction-level data for the federal funds market provide a rare look at the intraday behavior of trade volume and prices. An analysis of the data reveals that trade volume exhibits large swings over the course of the day while prices remain fairly stable, with rate volatility rising sharply only in the late afternoon. The analysis underscores the important role played by institutional deadlines-most notably, the close of trading-in driving movements in this market.
Report
Are exchange rates excessively volatile? And what does \\"excessively volatile\\" mean, anyway?
Using data for the major currencies from 1973 to 1994, we apply recent tests of asset price volatility to reexamine whether exchange rates have been "excessively" volatile with respect to the predictions of the monetary model of the exchange rate and of standard extensions that allow for sticky prices, sluggish money adjustment, and time-varying risk premia. Consistent with previous evidence from regression-based tests, most of the models that we examine are rejected by our volatility-based tests. In general, however, we find that exchange rates have not been excessively volatile relative ...
Report
The overnight interbank market: evidence from the G-7 and the Euro zone
This study of the major industrial countries' interbank markets for overnight loans links the behavior of very short-term interest rates to the operating procedures of the countries' central banks. Previous studies have focused on key features of the U.S. federal funds rate's behavior. We find that many of these features are not robust to changes in institutional details and in the style of central bank intervention, along both cross-sectional and time-series dimensions of our data. Our results suggest that the empirical features of the day-to-day behavior of short-term interest rates are ...
Report
Settlement delays in the money market
We track 38,000 money market trades from execution to delivery and return to provide a first empirical analysis of settlement delays in financial markets. In line with predictions from recent models showing that financial claims are settled strategically, we document a tendency by lenders to delay delivery of loaned funds until the afternoon hours. We find that banks follow a simple strategy to manage the risk of account overdrafts - delaying the settlement of large payments relative to that of small payments. More sophisticated strategies, such as increasing settlement delays when own liquid ...