A major lesson of the recent financial crisis is that the interbank lending market is crucial for banks that face uncertainty regarding their liquidity needs. This paper examines the efficiency of the interbank lending market in allocating funds and the optimal policy of a central bank in...

Surprisingly little is known about the importance of mortgage payment size for default, as efforts to measure the treatment effect of rate increases or loan modifi cations are confounded by borrower selection. We study a sample of hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages that have experienced large rate...

Monetary policy measures taken by the Federal Reserve as a response to the 2007-09 financial crisis and subsequent economic conditions led to a large increase in the level of outstanding reserves. The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has a range of tools to control short-term market rates in...

Although China now has one of the largest government bond markets in the world, the market has received relatively little attention and analysis. We describe the history and structure of the market and assess its functioning. We find that trading in individual bonds was historically sparse but...

Although the effects of economic news announcements on asset prices are well established, theserelationships are unlikely to be stable. This paper documents the time variation in the responses of yield curves and exchange rates using high-frequency data from January 2000 through August 2011....

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...

This paper examines time-varying measures of term premiums across ten developed economies. It shows that a single factor accounts for most of the variation in expected excess returns over time, across the maturity spectrum, and across countries. I construct a global return forecasting factor...

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...

The amount of reserves held by the US banking system reached $1.5 trillion in April 2011. Some economists argue that such a large quantity of bank reserves could lead to overly expansive bank lending as the economy recovers, regardless of the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy. In contrast,...

The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) was introduced by the Federal Reserve to promote liquidity in the financing markets for Treasury and other collateral. We evaluate one aspect of the program — the extent to which it has narrowed repo spreads between Treasury collateral and less...