Search Results
Journal Article
Implementing Monetary Policy in a Changing Federal Funds Market
As the Fed normalizes its balance sheet, it helps to understand how the federal funds market used to operate, how it changed in the wake of the crisis, and what comes next.
Working Paper
Meeting technologies and optimal trading mechanisms in competitive search markets
In a market in which sellers compete by posting mechanisms, we allow for a general meeting technology and show that its properties crucially affect the mechanism that sellers select in equilibrium. In general, it is optimal for sellers to post an auction without a reserve price but with a fee, paid by all buyers who meet with the seller. However, we define a novel condition on meeting technologies, which we call invariance, and show that meeting fees are equal to zero if and only if this condition is satisfied. Finally, we discuss how invariance is related to other properties of meeting ...
Working Paper
Screening and Adverse Selection in Frictional Markets
We incorporate a search-theoretic model of imperfect competition into a standard model of asymmetric information with unrestricted contracts. We characterize the unique equilibrium, and use our characterization to explore the interaction between adverse selection, screening, and imperfect competition. We show that the relationship between an agent?s type, the quantity he trades, and the price he pays is jointly determined by the severity of adverse selection and the concentration of market power. Therefore, quantifying the effects of adverse selection requires controlling for market ...
Journal Article
It’s Not Just Who You Know, It’s How You Know Them
What role do referrals play in matching workers with firms? And what are the consequences?
Working Paper
Excess Reserves and Monetary Policy Implementation
In response to the Great Recession, the Federal Reserve resorted to several unconventional policies that drastically altered the landscape of the federal funds market. The current environment, in which depository institutions are flush with excess reserves, has forced policymakers to design a new operational framework for monetary policy implementation. We provide a parsimonious model that captures the key features of the current federal funds market along with the instruments introduced by the Federal Reserve to implement its target for the federal funds rate. We use this model to analyze ...
Working Paper
A Model of the Federal Funds Market: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
The landscape of the federal funds market changed drastically in the wake of the Great Recession as large-scale asset purchase programs left depository institutions awash with reserves, and new regulations made it more costly for these institutions to lend. As traditional levers for implementing monetary policy became less effective, the Federal Reserve introduced new tools to implement the target range for the federal funds rate, changing this landscape even more. In this paper, we develop a model that is capable of reproducing the main features of the federal funds market, as observed ...
Working Paper
INFORMATION SPILLOVERS, GAINS FROM TRADE, AND INTERVENTIONS IN FROZEN MARKETS
We study government interventions in markets suffering from adverse selection. Importantly, asymmetric information prevents both the realization of gains from trade and the production of information that is valuable to other market participants. We find a fundamental tension in maximizing welfare: While some intervention is required to restore trading, too much intervention depletes trade of its informational content. We characterize the optimal policy that balances these two considerations and explore how it depends on features of the environment. Our model can be used to study a program ...
Working Paper
Corporate Bond Liquidity During the COVID-19 Crisis
We study liquidity conditions in the corporate bond market during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effects of the unprecedented interventions by the Federal Reserve. We find that, at the height of the crisis, liquidity conditions deteriorated substantially, as dealers appeared unwilling to absorb corporate debt onto their balance sheets. In particular, we document that the cost of risky-principal trades increased by a factor of five, forcing traders to shift to slower, agency trades. The announcements of the Federal Reserve’s interventions coincided with substantial improvements in trading ...
Working Paper
Inventory, Market Making, and Liquidity in OTC Markets
We develop a search-theoretic model of a dealer-intermediated over-the-counter market. Our key departure from the literature is to assume that, when a customer meets a dealer, the dealer can sell only assets that it already owns. Hence, in equilibrium, dealers choose to hold inventory. We derive the equilibrium relationship between dealers’ costs of holding assets on their balance sheets, their optimal inventory holdings, and various measures of liquidity, including bid-ask spreads, trade size, volume, and turnover. Using transaction-level data from the corporate bond market, we calibrate ...
Working Paper
Competing with asking prices
In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the seller receives no better offers. Despite their prevalence in a variety of real world markets, asking prices have received little attention in the academic literature. We construct an environment with a few simple, realistic ingredients and demonstrate that using an asking price is optimal: it is the ...