Search Results
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
Twin deficits, twenty years later
Recent declines in the U.S. current account and fiscal balances have sparked renewed debate over the twin-deficit hypothesis, which argues that a larger fiscal deficit, through its effect on national saving, leads to an expanded current account deficit. This study reviews international evidence on the hypothesis, finding some support for it. However, the link observed between fiscal and current account deficits is too weak to support the view that deficit reductions in the United States can play a major role in correcting the nation's current account imbalance with the rest of the world.
Journal Article
Designing effective auctions for treasury securities
Most discussions of treasury auction design focus on the choice between two methods for issuing securities--uniform-price or discriminatory auctions. Although auction theory and much recent research appear to favor the uniform-price method, most countries conduct their treasury auctions using the discriminatory format. What are the main issues underlying the debate over effective auction design?
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
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 ...
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 ...
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
Capital account liberalization as a signal
This paper presents a model in which a government's current capital controls policy signals future policies. Controls on capital outflows evolve in response to news on technology, contingent on government attitudes toward taxation of capital. When there is uncertainty over government types, a policy of liberal capital outflows sends a positive signal that may trigger a capital inflow. This prediction is consistent with the experience of several countries that have recently liberalized their capital accounts.
Report
Day-to-day monetary policy and the volatility of the federal funds interest rate
We propose a model of the interbank money market with an explicit role for central bank intervention and periodic reserve requirements, and study the interaction of profit-maximizing banks with a central bank targeting interest rates at high frequency. The model yields predictions on biweekly patterns of the federal funds rate's volatility and on its response to changes in target rates and in intervention procedures, such as those implemented by the Fed in 1994. Theoretical results are consistent with empirical patterns of interest rate volatility in the U.S. market for federal funds.
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 ...