Financial crises are associated with reduced volumes and extreme levels of rates for term inter-bank loans, reflected in the one-month and three-month Libor. We explain such stress by modeling leveraged banks' precautionary demand for liquidity. Asset shocks impair a bank's ability to roll over...

Over the last two decades, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the rate-setting body of the United States Federal Reserve System, has become increasingly communicative and transparent. According to policymakers, one of the goals of this shift has been to improve monetary policy...

A major lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the ability of banks to withstand liquidity shocks and to provide lending to one another is crucial for financial stability. This paper studies the functioning of the interbank lending market and the optimal policy of a central bank in...

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...

This paper studies the relationship between the business cycle and financial intermediation in the euro area. We establish stylized facts and study their stability during the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Long-term interest rates have been exceptionally high and...

The Term Auction Facility (TAF), the first auction-based liquidity initiative by the Federal Reserve during the global financial crisis, was aimed at improving conditions in the dollar money market and bringing down the significantly elevated London interbank offered rate (Libor). The...

This paper studies banks' incentives for choosing the timing of their payment submissions in a collateral-based real-time gross settlement payment system and the way in which these incentives change with the introduction of a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM). We show that an LSM allows banks to...

We examine the relationship between monetary policy operations and interbank borrowing and lending of funds using sovereign bonds as collateral. We first establish that, in the precrisis period, there are important but rather weak relations between these funding sources and that this...

Banks hold liquid and illiquid assets. An illiquid bank that receives a liquidity shock sells assets to liquid banks in exchange for cash. We characterize the constrained efficient allocation as the solution to a planner's problem and show that the market equilibrium is constrained inefficient,...