Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login to save this article or follow this journal

The Effectiveness of Alternative Monetary Policy Tools in a Zero Lower Bound Environment

Contents:

Author Info

  • JAMES D. HAMILTON
  • JING CYNTHIA WU

Abstract

This paper reviews alternative options for monetary policy when the short-term interest rate is at the zero lower bound and develops new empirical estimates of the effects of the maturity structure of publicly held debt on the term structure of interest rates. We use a model of risk-averse arbitrageurs to develop measures of how the maturity structure of debt held by the public might affect the pricing of level, slope and curvature term-structure risk. We find these Treasury factors historically were quite helpful for predicting both yields and excess returns over 1990-2007. The historical correlations are consistent with the claim that if in December of 2006, the Fed were to have sold off all its Treasury holdings of less than one-year maturity (about $400 billion) and use the proceeds to retire Treasury debt from the long end, this might have resulted in a 14-basis-point drop in the 10-year rate and an 11-basis-point increase in the 6-month rate. We also develop a description of how the dynamic behavior of the term structure of interest rates changed after hitting the zero lower bound in 2009. Our estimates imply that at the zero lower bound, such a maturity swap would have the same effects as buying $400 billion in long-term maturities outright with newly created reserves, and could reduce the 10-year rate by 13 basis points without raising short-term yields.

(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

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://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1538-4616.2011.00477.x
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Bibliographic Info

Article provided by Blackwell Publishing in its journal Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.

Volume (Year): 44 (2012)
Issue (Month): (02)
Pages: 3-46

as in new window
Handle: RePEc:mcb:jmoncb:v:44:y:2012:i::p:3-46

Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-2879

Related research

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

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. Refet S. Gürkaynak & Brian Sack & Jonathan H. Wright, 2006. "The U.S. Treasury yield curve: 1961 to the present," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-28, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  2. Ben S. Bernanke & Vincent R. Reinhart & Brian P. Sack, 2004. "Monetary policy alternatives at the zero bound: an empirical assessment," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2004-48, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  3. Joseph Gagnon & Matthew Raskin & Julie Remache & Brian Sack, 2011. "Large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve: did they work?," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue May, pages 41-59.
  4. Tobias Adrian & Karin Kimbrough & Dina Marchioni, 2011. "The Federal Reserve’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue May, pages 25-39.
  5. Hamilton, James D. & Wu, Jing Cynthia, 2012. "Identification and estimation of Gaussian affine term structure models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 168(2), pages 315-331.
  6. Gauti B. Eggertsson & Michael Woodford, 2003. "The Zero Bound on Interest Rates and Optimal Monetary Policy," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 34(1), pages 139-235.
  7. Greg Duffee, 2011. "Forecasting with the term structure: The role of no-arbitrage restrictions," Economics Working Paper Archive 576, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics.
  8. Baumeister, Christiane & Benati, Luca, 2010. "Unconventional monetary policy and the great recession - Estimating the impact of a compression in the yield spread at the zero lower bound," Working Paper Series 1258, European Central Bank.
  9. Eric T. Swanson, 2011. "Let's Twist Again: A High-Frequency Event-Study Analysis of Operation Twist and Its Implications for QE2," 2011 Meeting Papers 982, Society for Economic Dynamics.
  10. John C. Williams & John B. Taylor, 2009. "A Black Swan in the Money Market," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(1), pages 58-83, January.
  11. Jens H. E. Christensen & Jose A. Lopez & Glenn D. Rudebusch, 2014. "Do Central Bank Liquidity Facilities Affect Interbank Lending Rates?," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(1), pages 136-151, January.
  12. James D. Hamilton & Jing Cynthia Wu, 2011. "Testable Implications of Affine Term Structure Models," NBER Working Papers 16931, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  13. Taeyoung Doh, 2010. "The efficacy of large-scale asset purchases at the zero lower bound," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, issue Q II, pages 5-34.
  14. John Kitchen & Menzie Chinn, 2011. "Financing US Debt: Is There Enough Money in the World – and at What Cost?," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 14(3), pages 373-413, December.
  15. James McAndrews & Asani Sarkar & Zhenyu Wang, 2008. "The effect of the Term Auction Facility on the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate," Staff Reports 335, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
  16. Kenneth Kuttner, 2006. "Can Central Banks Target Bond Prices?," NBER Working Papers 12454, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  17. Wallace, Neil, 1981. "A Modigliani-Miller Theorem for Open-Market Operations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(3), pages 267-74, June.
  18. Burcu Duygan-Bump & Patrick Parkinson & Eric Rosengren & Gustavo A. Suarez & Paul Willen, 2013. "How Effective Were the Federal Reserve Emergency Liquidity Facilities? Evidence from the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 68(2), pages 715-737, 04.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Blog mentions

As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
  1. Vice Chair Janet L. Yellen: Perspectives on Monetary Policy
    by Guest Author in The Big Picture on 2012-06-07 11:05:32
  2. Full text: Janet Yellen – Perspectives on Monetary Policy
    by Guest Author in Credit Writedowns on 2012-06-07 13:10:28
  3. Quel est l’efficacité de l’assouplissement quantitatif ?
    by ? in D'un champ l'autre on 2014-05-01 12:19:00
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.

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:mcb:jmoncb:v:44:y:2012:i::p:3-46. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Wiley-Blackwell Digital Licensing) or (Christopher F. Baum).

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.