Selva Demiralp

The Liquidity Effect in the Federal Funds Market: Evidence from Daily Open Market Operations

We use forecast errors made by the Federal Reserve while preparing open market operations to identify a liquidity effect at a daily frequency in the federal funds market. We find a liquidity effect on most days of the reserve maintenance period in addition to settlement day. The effect is nonlinear; large changes in supply more consistently have a measurable effect than do small changes. In addition, a higher aggregate level of reserve balances in the banking system is associated with a smaller liquidity effect during the maintenance period but a larger liquidity effect on the last days of the period.

Money, Reserves, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Does the Money Multiplier Exist?

With the use of nontraditional policy tools, the level of reserve balances has risen significantly in the United States since 2007. Before the financial crisis, reserve balances were roughly

Overnight interbank loan markets

20 billion whereas the level has risen well past

A Bootstrap Method for Identifying and Evaluating a Structural Vector Autoregression

1 trillion. The effect of reserve balances in simple macroeconomic models often comes through the money multiplier, affecting the money supply and the amount of bank lending in the economy. Most models currently used for macroeconomic policy analysis, however, either exclude money or model money demand as entirely endogenous, thus precluding any causal role for reserves and money. Nevertheless, some academic research and many textbooks continue to use the money multiplier concept in discussions of money. We explore the institutional structure of the transmission mechanism beginning with open market operations through to money and loans. We then undertake empirical analysis of the relationship among reserve balances, money, and bank lending. We use aggregate as well as bank-level data in a VAR framework and document that the mechanism does not work through the standard multiplier model or the bank lending channel. In particular, if the level of reserve balances is expected to have an impact on the economy, it seems unlikely that a standard multiplier story will explain the effect.

Analyzing Federal Reserve Asset Purchases: From Whom Does the Fed Buy?

This paper investigates transactions and interest rates on brokered and direct trades in federal funds, Euro-dollar transactions, and repurchase agreements, all of which are used by banks in overnight funding. We expand on earlier work on calendar-day effects in these markets, investigating also volumes of funding in recent years. Our data include daily trades in federal funds reported by major brokers and also records of uncollateralized transactions over the wire transfer system operated by the Federal Reserve. We find that the share of the overnight interbank loan market represented by brokered fed funds has decreased and is now only about one-third of the total. We also show evidence of close but incomplete arbitrage among the major segments of the overnight interbank market, though the specific calendar-day patterns of spreads and volatilities have evolved relative to the literature using earlier sample periods.

Provision of Liquidity through the Primary Credit Facility during the Financial Crisis: A Structural Analysis

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based in the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal order for the structural autoregression (SVAR), rather than, as is typically done, assuming a weakly justified Choleski order. Demiralp and Hoover (2003) provided Monte Carlo evidence that such methods were effective, provided that signal strengths were sufficiently high. Unfortunately, in applications to actual data, such Monte Carlo simulations are of limited value, since the causal structure of the true data-generating process is necessarily unknown. In this paper, we present a bootstrap procedure that can be applied to actual data (i.e., without knowledge of the true causal structure). We show with an applied example and a simulation study that the procedure is an effective tool for assessing our confidence in causal orders identified by graph-theoretic search procedures.

Monetary policy surprises and the expectations hypothesis at the short end of the yield curve

Asset purchases have become an important monetary policy tool of the Federal Reserve in recent years. To date, most studies of the Federal Reserve’s asset purchases have tried to measure the interest rate effects of the purchases, and several provide evidence that these purchases do have important effects on longer-term market interest rates. The theory of how asset purchases work, however, is less well developed. Some of the empirical studies point to “preferred habitat” models in which investors do not have the same objectives, and therefore prefer to hold different types and maturities of securities. To study this more closely, we exploit Flow of Funds data to assess the types of investors that are selling to the Federal Reserve and their portfolio adjustment after these sales, which could provide a view to the plausibility of preferred habitat models and the transmission of unconventional monetary policy across asset markets. We find that the Federal Reserve is ultimately buying from only a handful of investor types, primarily households (which includes hedge funds), with a different reaction to changes in Federal Reserve holdings of longer-term versus shorter-term assets. Although not evident for all investors, the key participants are shown to rebalance their portfolios toward more risky assets during this period. These results can be interpreted as supporting, at least in part, the preferred habit theory and the view that the monetary policy transmission is working across asset markets.

Government Support of Banks and Bank Lending

Over the course of the recent liquidity crisis, the Federal Reserve made several changes to its primary credit lending facility such as narrowing the spread between the primary credit rate and the target funds rate and increasing the term of the borrowing. In this paper, we use the model developed by Artuc and Demiralp (2008) to provide a structural assessment of the effectiveness of these changes. Our results suggest that these changes were effective in stabilizing the federal funds market.

Volatility, Money Market Rates, and the Transmission of Monetary Policy

We test the expectations hypothesis by analyzing changes in three-month T-Bill rates (TB3) after FOMC meetings. By estimating the revisions in expectations of future overnight rates, we find a one-to-one relationship between changes in TB3 and path revisions.

Negative Interest Rates, Excess Liquidity and Bank Business Models: Banks’ Reaction to Unconventional Monetary Policy in the Euro Area

The extraordinary steps taken by governments during the 2007-2009 financial crisis to prevent the failure of large financial institutions and support credit availability have invited heated debate. This paper comprehensively reviews empirical assessments of the benefits of those programs—such as their effectiveness in reducing bank failures or supporting new lending—introduces a combined dataset of five key programs that provided term debt or equity to banks in the U.S., and assesses the effects of such support on lending by U.S. banks. The results, using an instrumental variable approach, suggest that bank loans did not increase at institutions receiving government support.