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Journal Article
Cleared Margin Setting at Selected Central Counterparties
Interviews with senior personnel at six of the world?s largest central counterparty clearing houses and research by financial markets staff shed light on regulations, principles, and best practices in margin setting for derivatives.
Journal Article
The crisis of 1998 and the role of the central bank
Following the Russian default and devaluation in August 1998, financial markets were characterized by a withdrawal of liquidity, a flight to the safest assets, increased concerns about credit quality, and large declines in asset values. However, the crisis ended following a rather modest interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve. Why did the central bank's action have this effect? This article argues that the crisis was an episode of potential coordination failure, triggered by, but distinct from, the events in Russia. The Federal Reserve's action signaled a policy change that serve to ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy shocks and long-term interest rates
Exogenous shocks to monetary policy strongly affect short-term interest rates, but have little or no effect on longer-term interest rates.
Journal Article
Origins of the use of Treasury debt in open market operations: lessons for the present
The Federal Reserve currently conducts open market operations primarily in Treasury securities. It has not always done so. In its earliest years, the Fed conducted open market operations primarily in private securities, such as bankers' acceptances. The Fed's choice of instruments was based both on economic doctrine and to help foster a liquid secondary market in these securities. The move to reliance on Treasury securities resulted from changes in the financial markets and the prevailing economic doctrine. These historical antecedents may have relevance for current problems facing the ...
Journal Article
The role of time-critical liquidity in financial markets
This article examines the growing dependence of global financial markets on time-critical liquidity in managing settlement risk and its implications for financial regulation.
Journal Article
Understanding the Asian crisis: systemic risk as coordination failure
Systemic crises, such as the recent Asian crisis, may be due to an inability of individual to optimally coordinate their investment strategies.
Working Paper
\"Peso problem\" explanations for term structure anomalies
We examine the empirical evidence on the expectation hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany using the Campbell-Shiller (1991) regressions and a vector-autoregressive methodology. We argue that anomalies in the U.S. term structure, documented by Campbell and Shiller (1991), may be due to a generalized peso problem in which a high-interest rate regime occurred less frequently in the sample of U.S. data than was rationally anticipated. We formalize this idea as a regime-switching model of short-term interest rates estimated with ...
Working Paper
Bank capital standards for market risk: a welfare analysis
We develop a model of commodity money and use it to analyze the following two questions motivated by issues in monetary history: What are the conditions under which Gresham's Law holds? And, what are the mechanics of a debasement (lowering the metallic content of coins)? The model contains light and heavy coins, imperfect information, and prices determined via bilateral bargaining. There are equilibria with neither, both, or only one type of coin in circulation. When both circulate, coins may trade by weight or by tale. We discuss the extent to which Gresham's Law holds in the various cases. ...
Working Paper
On biases in tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates
We document extreme bias and dispersion in the small sample distributions of five standard regression tests of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates. These biases derive from the extreme persistence in short interest rates. We derive approximate analytic expressions for these biases, and we characterize the small-sample distributions of these test statistics under a simple first-order autoregressive data generating process for the short rate. The biases are also present when the short rate is modeled with a more realistic regime-switching process. The differences ...
Working Paper
The equity premium puzzle and the risk-free rate puzzle at long horizons
The failure of consumption based asset pricing models to match the stochastic properties of the equity premium and the risk-free rate has been attributed by some authors to frictions, transaction costs or durability. However, such frictions would primarily affect the higher frequency data components: consumption-based pricing models that concentrate on long-horizon returns should be more successful. ; We consider three consumption-based models of the asset-pricing kernel: time-separable utility, and the models of Abel (1990) and Constantinides (1990). We estimate a vector ARCH model that ...