Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Why do T-bill rates react to discount rate changes?

Contents:

Author Info

  • Daniel L. Thornton

Abstract

This paper investigates the hypothesis suggested by Cook and Hahn (1988) that the T-bill rates respond to the announcement of discount rate changes because the market takes discount rate changes to be a signal that the Fed has changed its target for the federal funds rate. Re-Interpreting Cook and Hahn's empirical evidence and using theirs and an alternative methodology, we show that the evidence cannot differentiate their hypothesis from a number of others that have been suggested in the literature. We further find that there is no difference in the relative magnitude or timing of the response during periods when the Fed was directly targeting the funds rate or using a "fuzzy" funds rate target. This result suggests that the market does not simply interpret discount rate changes as a signal that the Fed has changed its target for the funds rate.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/1992/92-004.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in its series Working Papers with number 1992-004.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 1992
Date of revision:
Publication status: Published in Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, November 1994
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:1992-004

Contact details of provider:
Postal: P.O. Box 442, St. Louis, MO 63166
Fax: (314)444-8753
Web page: http://www.stlouisfed.org/
More information through EDIRC

Order Information:
Email:

Related research

Keywords: Discount;

Other versions of this item:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Fama, Eugene F., 1986. "Term premiums and default premiums in money markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 175-196, September.
  2. Marvin Goodfriend, 1990. "Interest rates and the conduct of monetary policy," Working Paper 90-06, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
  3. Robert J. Shiller & John Y. Campbell & Kermit L. Schoenholtz, 1983. "Forward Rates and Future Policy: Interpreting the Term Structure of Interest Rates," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 667, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
  4. Smirlock, Michael J & Yawitz, Jess B, 1985. " Asset Returns, Discount Rate Changes, and Market Efficiency," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(4), pages 1141-58, September.
  5. White, Halbert, 1980. "A Heteroskedasticity-Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimator and a Direct Test for Heteroskedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 817-38, May.
  6. Cook, Timothy & Hahn, Thomas, 1988. "The Information Content of Discount Rate Announcements and Their Effect on Market Interest Rates," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 20(2), pages 167-80, May.
  7. N. Gregory Mankiw & Jeffrey A. Miron, 1986. "The Changing Behavior of the Term Structure of Interest Rates," NBER Working Papers 1669, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  8. Poole, William, 1991. "Interest rates and the conduct of monetary policy : A comment," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 31-39, January.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Daniel L. Thornton, 1996. "The information content of discount rate announcements: what's behind the announcement effect?," Working Papers 1994-032, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
  2. Choi, Woon Gyu, 1999. "Estimating the Discount Rate Policy Reaction Function of the Monetary Authority," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 14(4), pages 379-401, July-Aug..
  3. Michael Dueker & Daniel L. Thornton, 1994. "Asymmetry in the prime rate and firms' preference for internal finance," Working Papers 1994-017, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:1992-004

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Diane Rosenberger).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.