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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 ...
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 ...