Monetary Policy Surprises and the Expectations Hypothesis at the Short End of the Yield Curve

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.Expectations Hypothesis, Policy Path Revisions

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

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 Artuç 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.Discount Window, Primary Credit, Federal Funds Market

Asymmetric Response to Monetary Policy Surprises at the Long-End of the Yield Curve

This paper provides a dynamic analysis of the responsiveness of asset markets to monetary policy path revisions. In an era of increased transparency and gradualism in policy making, one might expect an increased response to path revisions in asset markets as the policy actions become more predictable over longer horizons. Using federal funds futures contracts to extract near-term path revisions, we find that the responsiveness of Treasury securities to path revisions is significantly asymmetric, increasing during cycles of tightenings and declining during easings. This is consistent with the earlier literature that documents asymmetric effects of monetary policy on output.Asymmetric monetary policy; yield curve; federal funds futures

The Pavlovian Response of Term Rates to Fed Announcements.

The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the Federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the Federal funds rate via public disclosures of the new level of the Federal funds rate target and the ""announcement effect.'''' We define the announcement effect as the portion of interest rate movements associated with public statements on interest rate targets that do not require conventional open market operations for their support. This paper provides evidence on how the Fed uses the liquidity effect in conjunction with the announcement effect to execute monetary policy. In addition, it investigates the implications of the announcement effect on term structure behavior and the rational expectations hypothesis.Liquidity Effect, Announcement Effect, Term Structure, Marked Point Process

Anticipation of Monetary Policy and Open Market Operations

Central banking transparency is now a topic of great interest, but its impact on the implementation of monetary policy has not been studied. This paper documents that anticipated changes in the target federal funds rate complicate open market operations. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence on the behavior of banks and the Open Market Trading Desk. We find a significant shift in demand for funds ahead of expected target rate changes and that the Desk only incompletely accommodates this shift in demand. This anticipation effect, however, does not materially affect other markets.

Searching for the Causal Structure of a Vector Autoregression

Vector autoregressions (VARs) are economically interpretable only when identified by being transformed into a structural form (the SVAR) in which the contemporaneous variables stand in a well-defined causal order. These identifying transformations are not unique. It is widely believed that practitioners must choose among them using a priori theory or other criteria not rooted in the data under analysis. We show how to apply graph-theoretic methods of searching for causal structure based on relations of conditional independence to select among the possible causal orders – or at least to reduce the admissible causal orders to a narrow equivalence class. The graph-theoretic approaches were developed by computer scientists and philosophers (Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes among others) and applied to cross-sectional data. We provide an accessible introduction to this work. Then building on the work of Swanson and Granger (1997), we show how to apply it to searching for the causal order of an SVAR. We present simulation results to show how the efficacy of the search method algorithm varies with signal strength for realistic sample lengths. Our findings suggest that graph-theoretic methods may prove to be a useful tool in the analysis of SVARs.search, causality, structural vector autoregression, graph theory, common cause, causal Markov condition, Wold causal order, identification; PC algorithm

Money and the Transmission of Monetary Policy

The transmission mechanism of monetary policy has received extensive treatment in the macroeconomic literature. Most models currently used for macroeconomic analysis exclude money or else model money demand as entirely endogenous. Nevertheless, 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 to document that the mechanism does not work through the standard multiplier model or the bank lending channel. Our analysis, however, does not reflect on the existence of a broader credit channelMonetary transmission mechanism, money multiplier, lending channel

The announcement effect: evidence from open market desk data

Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary TransmissionOpen market operations ; Monetary policy ; Federal Open Market Committee ; Federal funds market (United States)

Provision of liquidity through the primary credit facility during the financial crisis: a structural analysis

Professors Erhan Artuç and Selva Demiralp of Koç University, Turkey, investigate whether changes to the Federal Reserve’s discount window borrowing facility represent a shift in how the nation’s central bank traditionally provided liquidity through the primary credit facility as well as whether the Fed would benefit from retaining these changes indefinitely. Presented at "Central Bank Liquidity Tools and Perspectives on Regulatory Reform" a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, February 19-20, 2009.Banks and banking, Central ; Liquidity (Economics) ; Bank liquidity ; Credit ; Discount window ; Bank reserves

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

We explore the effect of volatility in the federal funds market on the expectations hypothesis in money markets. We find that lower volatility in the bank funding markets market, all else equal, leads to a lower term premium and thus longer-term rates for a given setting of the overnight rate. The results appear to hold for the US as well as the Euro Area and the UK. The results have implications for the design of operational frameworks for the implementation of monetary policy and for the interpretation of the changes in the Libor-OIS spread during the financial crisisMonetary transmission mechanism, expectations hypothesis, term premium