This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on the federal funds market, specifically the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Rather than a complete collapse of lending in the presence of a market wide shock, we see that banks become more restrictive in which counterparties they...

How much ability does the Fed have to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates? We argue that the presence of substantial debt in fixed-rate, prepayable mortgages means that the ability to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates depends not just on their current level but also on...

In October 1979 the Federal Reserve shifted from an interest rate oriented operating procedure to a reserves oriented procedure. It is argued in this paper that part of the very large increase in interest rate volatility which resulted from the policy switch may have been due to shifts in the...

Most central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, implement their monetary policy by setting interest rates. This paper reviews the major changes that have taken place along the way from the Federal Reserve's interest rate-based policy structure of the 1960s to the interest...

This paper studies some continuous-time cash-in-advance models in which interest rate smoothing is optimal. We consider both deterministic and stochastic models. In the stochastic case we obtain two results of independent interest: (i) we study what is, to our knowledge, the only version of the...

The paper develops a model in which targeting of the nominal interest rate is a reasonable guide for monetary policy. Expected real interest rates and output are exogenous with respect to monetary variables, and the central bank ends up influencing nominal interest rates by altering expected...

Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; today this process involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In...

We measure monetary policy shocks as changes in the Fed funds target rate that surprise bond markets in daily data. These shock series avoid the omitted variable, time-varying parameter, and orthogonalization problem of monthly VARs, and do not impose the expectations hypothesis. We find...

A model of interest rate movements in response to new information on the money stock is developed.The model, which incorporates several earlier approaches as special cases, makes explicit the manner in which estimated interest rate responses to money surprises depend on the relative variances of...

Using an optimizing model we derive the optimal monetary and exchange rate policy for a small stochastic open economy with imperfect competition and short run price rigidity. The optimal monetary policy has an exact closed-form solution and is obtained using the utility function of the...