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The Federal Reserve's operating procedure, nonborrowed reserves, borrowed reserves and the liquidity effect

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Daniel L. Thornton

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Abstract

Recently, there has been considerable interest in identifying the exogenous policy actions of the Fed and a number of identification methods have been proposed. This paper deals with one of these, namely, using nonborrowed reserves in a recursive structural vector autoregression(VAR). A number of researchers [Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1994ab, 1996, 1997), Evans and Marshall(1997), Strongin(1995), Pagan and Robertson(1995) and Brunner(1994)] find evidence of a statistically significant liquidity effect using nonborrowed reserves in a VAR. The success in finding the liquidity effect with nonborrowed reserves in the VAR is attributed to innovations to nonborrowed reserves reflecting supply shocks while innovations to total reserves primarily reflect shocks to demand. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the opposite is true. Evidence of the liquidity effect in recursive structural VARs depends critically on the existence of a negative covariance between the federal funds rate and nonborrowed reserves. Under a variety of operating objectives, the Trading Desk of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has offset changes in bank-initiated discount window borrowing when implementing the Federal Open Market Committee's policy directive. This practice has created a negative contemporaneous covariance between nonborrowed reserves and the funds rate that has been incorrectly attributed to the liquidity effect. Once the Desk's practice is accounted for, there is no evidence of a statistically significant liquidity effect.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in its series Working Papers with number 1998-009.

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Date of creation: 1998
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Publication status: Published in Journal of Banking and Finance, September 2001, 25(9), pp. 1717-39
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedlwp:1998-009

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Keywords: Bank reserves ; Open market operations ; Liquidity (Economics);

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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.:
  1. Thornton, Daniel L & Batten, Dallas S, 1985. "Lag-Length Selection and Tests of Granger Causality between Money and Income," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 17(2), pages 164-78, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Coleman, Wilbur John, II & Gilles, Christian & Labadie, Pamela A, 1996. "A Model of the Federal Funds Market," Economic Theory, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 337-57, February.
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  3. Glenn D. Rudebusch, 1996. "Do measures of monetary policy in a VAR make sense?," Working Papers in Applied Economic Theory 96-05, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
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  4. Reichenstein, William, 1987. "The Impact of Money on Short-term Interest Rates," Economic Inquiry, Oxford University Press, vol. 25(1), pages 67-82, January.
  5. Cagan, Phillip & Gandolfi, Arthur, 1969. "The Lag in Monetary Policy as Implied by the Time Pattern of Monetary Effects on Interest Rates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 59(2), pages 277-84, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Feinman, Joshua N, 1993. "Estimating the Open Market Desk's Daily Reaction Function," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 25(2), pages 231-47, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. James A. Clouse, 1994. "Recent developments in discount window policy," Federal Reserve Bulletin, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), issue Nov, pages 965-977.
  8. Leeper, Eric M. & Gordon, David B., 1992. "In search of the liquidity effect," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 341-369, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Melvin, Michael, 1983. "The Vanishing Liquidity Effect of Money on Interest: Analysis and Implications for Policy," Economic Inquiry, Oxford University Press, vol. 21(2), pages 188-202, April.
  10. Frederic S. Mishkin, 1982. "Monetary Policy and Short-Term Interest Rates: An Efficient Markets-Rational Expectations Approach," NBER Working Papers 0693, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. Charles L. Evans & David A. Marshall, 1997. "Monetary policy and the term structure of nominal interest rates: evidence and theory," Working Paper Series, Macroeconomic Issues WP-97-10, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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  12. Lawrence J. Christiano, 1996. "Identification and the liquidity effect: a case study," Economic Perspectives, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, issue May, pages 2-13. [Downloadable!]
  13. Adrian R. Pagan & John C. Robertson, 1995. "Resolving the liquidity effect," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue May, pages 33-54. [Downloadable!]
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  14. Hamilton, James D, 1997. "Measuring the Liquidity Effect," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 87(1), pages 80-97, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  15. Bernanke, Ben S. & Mihov, Ilian, 1995. "Measuring Monetary Policy," Economics Series 10, Institute for Advanced Studies. [Downloadable!]
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  16. Peristiani, Stavros, 1991. "The Model Structure of Discount Window Borrowing," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 23(1), pages 13-34, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  17. Allan D. Brunner, 1994. "The federal funds rate and the implementation of monetary policy: estimating the Federal Reserve's reaction function," International Finance Discussion Papers 466, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  18. Stephen G. Cecchetti, 1995. "Distinguishing theories of the monetary transmission mechanism," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue May, pages 83-97. [Downloadable!]
  19. Cochrane, John H, 1989. "The Return of the Liquidity Effect: A Study of the Short-run Relation between Money Growth and Interest Rates," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 7(1), pages 75-83, January.
  20. Strongin, Steven, 1995. "The identification of monetary policy disturbances explaining the liquidity puzzle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 463-497, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  21. Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer., 1989. "Does Monetary Policy Matter? A New Test in the Spirit of Friedman and Schwartz," Economics Working Papers 89-107, University of California at Berkeley.
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  22. Laidler, David, 1984. "The 'Buffer Stock' Notion in Monetary Economics," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 94(376a), pages 17-34, Supplemen. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  23. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & Charles L. Evans, 1997. "Modeling money," Working Paper Series, Macroeconomic Issues WP-97-17, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
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    • Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & Charles L. Evans, 1998. "Modeling Money," NBER Working Papers 6371, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  24. Gordon, David B & Leeper, Eric M, 1994. "The Dynamic Impacts of Monetary Policy: An Exercise in Tentative Identification," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(6), pages 1228-47, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  25. Daniel L. Thornton, 1988. "The borrowed-reserves operating procedures: theory and evidence," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jan, pages 30-54. [Downloadable!]
  26. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum, 1991. "Identification and the Liquidity Effect of a Monetary Policy Shock," NBER Working Papers 3920, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  27. Hoover, Kevin D. & Perez, Stephen J., 1994. "Post hoc ergo propter once more an evaluation of 'does monetary policy matter?' in the spirit of James Tobin," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(1), pages 47-74, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  28. Spindt, Paul A. & Tarhan, Vefa, 1987. "The Federal Reserve's new operating procedures : A post mortem," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 107-123, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  29. Jon Faust, 1998. "The robustness of identified VAR conclusions about money," International Finance Discussion Papers 610, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  30. Christiano, Lawrence J & Eichenbaum, Martin & Evans, Charles, 1996. "The Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks: Evidence from the Flow of Funds," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 78(1), pages 16-34, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  31. Bernanke, Ben S & Blinder, Alan S, 1992. "The Federal Funds Rate and the Channels of Monetary Transmission," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(4), pages 901-21, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  32. Johansen, Soren, 1988. "Statistical analysis of cointegration vectors," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 12(2-3), pages 231-254. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, 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.)

  1. Daniel L. Thornton, 2003. "Forecasting the Treasury's balance at the Fed," Working Papers 2001-004, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
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  2. Lucio Sarno & Daniel L. Thornton & Yi Wen, 2002. "What's unique about the federal funds rate? evidence from a spectral perspective," Working Papers 2002-029, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Daniel L. Thornton, 2005. "When did the FOMC begin targeting the federal funds rate? what the verbatim transcripts tell us," Working Papers 2004-015, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  4. James D. Hamilton & Oscar Jorda, 2000. "A Model for the Federal Funds Rate Target," NBER Working Papers 7847, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  5. Daniel L. Thornton, 2007. "Open market operations and the federal funds rate," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Nov, pages 549-570. [Downloadable!]
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  6. Daniel L. Thornton, 2006. "The daily liquidity effect," Working Papers 2006-020, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  7. Steen Ejerskov & Clara Martin Moss & Livio Stracca, 2003. "How does the ECB allot liquidity in its weekly main refinancing operations? A look at the empirical evidence," Working Paper Series 244, European Central Bank. [Downloadable!]
  8. Daniel L. Thornton, 2009. "The Fed, liquidity, and credit allocation," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Jan, pages 13-22. [Downloadable!]
  9. Selva Demiralp & Oscar Jorda, . "The Pavlovian Response of Term Rates to Fed Announcements," Department of Economics 99-06, California Davis - Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  10. Daniel L. Thornton, 2008. "Monetary policy: why money matters and interest rates don't," Working Papers 2008-011, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  11. Livio Stracca & Clara Martin Moss & Livio Stracca, 2004. "Demand and supply in the ECB's main refinancing operations," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2003 94, Money Macro and Finance Research Group. [Downloadable!]
  12. Paolo Angelini, 2002. "Liquidity and Announcement Effects in the Euro Area," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 451, Bank of Italy, Economic Research Department. [Downloadable!]
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  13. Michael T. Owyang, 2002. "Modeling Volcker as a non-absorbing state: agnostic identification of a Markov-switching VAR," Working Papers 2002-018, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  14. Lucio Sarno & Daniel L. Thornton, 2003. "The efficient market hypothesis and identification in structural VARs," Working Papers 2003-032, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
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