Beginning in October 2011, the Federal Reserve began ongoing purchases of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). I test the extent to which these purchases were associated with disruptions in indicators of market functioning by using daily data on Federal Reserve MBS purchase operations. I find that...

How large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs affect financial markets is an important question for policy makers that face the zero lower bound. While so-called “stock effects”–that is, persistent shifts in asset prices observed as the result of an LSAP program–are relatively well...