Derivative Margin Calls : A New Driver of MMF Flows

During the March 2020 market turmoil, euro area money-market funds (MMFs) expe-rienced significant outflows, reaching almost 8% of assets under management. This paper investigates whether the volatility in MMF flows was driven by investors’ liquidity needs re-lated to derivative margin payments. We combine three highly granular unique data sources (EMIR data for derivatives, SHSS data for investor holdings of MMFs and Refinitiv Lip-per data for daily MMF flows) to construct a daily fund-level panel dataset spanning from February to April 2020. We estimate the effects of variation margin paid and received by the largest holders of EUR-denominated MMFs on flows of these MMFs. The main findings suggest that variation margin payments faced by some investors holding MMFs were an im-portant driver of the flows of EUR-denominated MMFs domiciled in euro area