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....

Several recent studies have reached quite different conclusions about which variable is the best indicator of the stance of monetary policy. These differences likely reflect varying assumptions about bank and Federal Reserve behavior. This paper takes a detailed and comprehensive look at the...

A considerable volume of research shows that asset prices respond to changes in the Federal Reserve's discount rate. While several competing hypotheses have been advanced to explain the market's response to discount rate announcements, comparatively little effort has been made to differentiate...

In October 1982 the FOMC deemphasized M1 and moved to what is commonly referred to as a borrowed reserves operating procedure. Sometime thereafter the FOMC switched to a funds rate targeting procedure but never formally announced the change. Given the close correspondence between a borrowed...

We develop a model of the market for federal funds that explicitly accounts for its two distinctive features: banks have to search for a suitable counterparty, and once they have met, both parties negotiate the size of the loan and the repayment. The theory is used to answer a number of positive...

We use minute-by-minute daily transaction-level payments data to document the cross-sectional and time-series behavior of the estimated prices and quantities negotiated by commercial banks in the fed funds market. We study the frequency and volume of trade, the size distribution of loans, the...

We use an information-theoretic approach to describe changes in lending relationships between federal funds market participants around the time of the Lehman Brothers failure. Unlike previous work that conducts maximum-likelihood estimation on undirected networks, our analysis distinguishes...

To combat the financial crisis that intensified in the fall of 2008, the Federal Reserve injected a substantial amount of liquidity into the banking system. The resulting increase in reserve balances exerted downward price pressure in the federal funds market, and the effective federal funds...

Many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets' expectations of future monetary policy. However, to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia, these measures require some adjustment. In this paper, we document that excess returns on...