Since January 1994, the Federal Reserve Board has permitted depository institutions in the United States to implement so-called retail sweep programs. The essence of these programs is computer software that dynamically reclassifies customer deposits between transaction accounts, which are...

What are "reserves," and why do banks hold them? What are "sweep accounts," and how do they work? What’s the relationship between the two? And what’s the Fed’s role in all of this? In this article, Jeff Wrase considers the effect sweep accounts have had on the market for bank reserves and...

This paper develops a measure of the immediate effect on the federal funds rate of an open market operation. Because open market operations are often responses to current or anticipated economic developments, there is a serious problem of simultaneous equations bias in measuring this effect....