IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgfe/2025-100.html

Central Bank Access and Flight to Safety

Author

Abstract

We examine whether access to the Federal Reserve's Overnight Reverse Repo Facility (ON RRP) affects money market fund flows during flight-to-safety episodes. We find that funds with ON RRP access serving sophisticated investors experience about a 1 percentage point increase in net daily flows over total assets during the March 2020 flight-to-safety episode relative to similar funds without access. The effect aligns with theoretical predictions and explains more than half of the inflows in those funds. Our results show that access to central bank deposit facilities amplifies flight-to-safety behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Lucia Gurrieri & Chase P. Ross & Ben Schmiedt & Alexandros Vardoulakis & Vladimir Yankov, 2025. "Central Bank Access and Flight to Safety," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2025-100, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2025-100
    DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2025.100
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2025100pap.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.17016/FEDS.2025.100?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lei Li & Yi Li & Marco Macchiavelli & Xing (Alex) Zhou, 2021. "Liquidity Restrictions, Runs, and Central Bank Interventions: Evidence from Money Market Funds [Dealer financial conditions and lender-of-last-resort facilities]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(11), pages 5402-5437.
    2. Marco Cipriani & Gabriele La Spada, 2020. "Sophisticated and Unsophisticated Runs," Staff Reports 956, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    3. Vayanos, Dimitri, 2004. "Flight to quality, flight to liquidity, and the pricing of risk," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 456, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Mark Carlson & Burcu Duygan-Bump & Fabio Natalucci & Bill Nelson & Marcelo Ochoa & Jeremy Stein & Skander Van den Heuvel, 2016. "The Demand for Short-Term, Safe Assets and Financial Stability: Some Evidence and Implications for Central Bank Policies," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 12(4), pages 307-333, December.
    5. Marcin Kacperczyk & Philipp Schnabl, 2013. "How Safe Are Money Market Funds?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 128(3), pages 1073-1122.
    6. Marco Cipriani & Thomas M. Eisenbach & Anna Kovner, 2024. "Tracing Bank Runs in Real Time," Working Paper 24-10, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
    7. Ricardo J. Caballero & Arvind Krishnamurthy, 2008. "Collective Risk Management in a Flight to Quality Episode," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(5), pages 2195-2230, October.
    8. Cipriani, Marco & La Spada, Gabriele, 2021. "Investors’ appetite for money-like assets: The MMF industry after the 2014 regulatory reform," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 140(1), pages 250-269.
    9. Lawrence Schmidt & Allan Timmermann & Russ Wermers, 2016. "Runs on Money Market Mutual Funds," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(9), pages 2625-2657, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kenechukwu E. Anadu & Pablo D. Azar & Catherine Huang & Marco Cipriani & Thomas M. Eisenbach & Gabriele La Spada & Mattia Landoni & Marco Macchiavelli & Antoine Malfroy-Camine & J. Christina Wang, 2023. "Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?," Staff Reports 1073, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    2. Lugo, Stefano, 2023. "Cost of monitoring and risk taking in the money market funds industry," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 53(C).
    3. Wang, Wei & Li, Lin, 2024. "Digital payment, money market fund and investment behavior," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    4. Capotă, Laura-Dona & Grill, Michael & Molestina Vivar, Luis & Schmitz, Niklas & Weistroffer, Christian, 2022. "Is the EU money market fund regulation fit for purpose? Lessons from the COVID-19 turmoil," Working Paper Series 2737, European Central Bank.
    5. Gissler, Stefan & Macchiavelli, Marco & Narajabad, Borghan, 2025. "Providing safety in a rush: How did shadow banks respond to a $1 trillion shock?," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    6. Xiaole Tong & Jingfei Wang, 2023. "Does the Development of Money Market Funds in China Increase the Bank Liquidity Risk?," Journal of Applied Finance & Banking, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 13(1), pages 1-7.
    7. Fricke, Daniel & Greppmair, Stefan & Paludkiewicz, Karol, 2024. "You can’t always get what you want (where you want it): Cross-border effects of the US money market fund reform," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    8. Rzeźnik, Aleksandra, 2025. "Skilled active liquidity management: Evidence from shocks to fund flows," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    9. Thomas M. Eisenbach & Gregory Phelan, 2022. "Fragility of Safe Asset Markets," Staff Reports 1026, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    10. Voellmy, Lukas, 2024. "Preventing runs under sequential revelation of liquidity needs," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).
    11. Huberto M. Ennis & Jeffrey M. Lacker & John A. Weinberg, 2023. "Money Market Fund Reform: Dealing with the Fundamental Problem," JRFM, MDPI, vol. 16(1), pages 1-14, January.
    12. Xuesong Huang & Todd Keister, 2025. "Can Redemption Fees Prevent Runs on Funds?," Staff Reports 1160, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    13. Kristian Blickle & Markus Brunnermeier & Stephan Luck, 2024. "Who Can Tell Which Banks Will Fail?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 37(9), pages 2685-2731.
    14. Keshav, Vaibhav & Vaidya, Meghana, 2025. "Geopolitical spillover: The Russia–Ukraine invasion and its effects on money market funds," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 89(C).
    15. Baes, Michel & Bouveret, Antoine & Schaanning, Eric, 2025. "Money Market Funds vulnerabilities and systemic liquidity crises," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 179(C).
    16. Ye Li & Simon Mayer & Simon Mayer, 2021. "Money Creation in Decentralized Finance: A Dynamic Model of Stablecoin and Crypto Shadow Banking," CESifo Working Paper Series 9260, CESifo.
    17. Järvenpää, Maija & Paavola, Aleksi, 2021. "Investor monitoring, money-likeness and stability of money market funds," Research Discussion Papers 2/2021, Bank of Finland.
    18. Goldstein, Itay & Jiang, Hao & Ng, David T., 2017. "Investor flows and fragility in corporate bond funds," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(3), pages 592-613.
    19. Abbas Hejri, 2022. "On the recent developments of mutual funds with fixed‐income holdings: a systematic review," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 62(2), pages 2313-2338, June.
    20. Sirio Aramonte, 2025. "The case for supporting liquidity supply in (some corners of) non-bank intermediation," International Finance Discussion Papers 1425, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E58 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Central Banks and Their Policies
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2025-100. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.