Until June 2000 the European Central Bank (ECB) used fixed rate tenders for its weekly repo auctions. A switch to variable rate tenders became necessary due to massive overbidding by banks. In this paper we introduce a stylized game among banks to investigate this overbidding phenomenon. Our...

Weekly repo auctions are the European Central Bank's most important policy instrument. Provided that banks bid seriously, these auctions should reveal useful information about banks' liquidity needs and the stance of monetary policy. However 1 as we show in this paper, the applied auction rules...

Recently there has been much theoretical and experimental work on learning in games. However, learning usually means "learning about the strategic behavior of opponents" rather than "learning about the game" as such. In contrast, here we report on an experiment designed to test whether players...

Securities repurchase agreements (REPOs) have become the Bundesbank's most important tool for its ongoing money market management and the control of the monetary base. In the fall of 1988, the Bundesbank changed the applied auction rule in order to prevent banks from submitting exaggerated bids....

This article provides new evidence on the empirical relationship between inflation and relative prices in the United States. In line with the predictions of recent monetary search models, we find that the impact of expected inflation on relative price variability (RPV) has disappeared during the...

The maturity of the operational target of monetary policy is a distinguishing feature of the SNB's operational framework of monetary policy. While most central banks use targets for the overnight rate to signal the policy-intended interest rate level, the SNB announces a target range for the...

This paper investigates how the implementation of monetary policy affects the dynamics and the volatility of the federal funds rate. Since the early 1980s, the most important changes in the Fed's conduct of monetary policy refer to the role of the federal funds rate target and the reserve...