IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednsr/335.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The effect of the Term Auction Facility on the London inter-bank offered rate

Author

Listed:
  • McAndrews, James J.

    () (Wharton Financial Institutions Center)

  • Sarkar, Asani

    (Federal Reserve Bank of New York)

  • Wang, Zhenyu

    () (Indiana University of Bloomington, Kelley School of Business)

Abstract

The Term Auction Facility (TAF), the first auction-based liquidity initiative by the Federal Reserve during the global financial crisis, was aimed at improving conditions in the dollar money market and bringing down the significantly elevated London interbank offered rate (Libor). The effectiveness of this innovative policy tool is crucial for understanding the role of the central bank in financial stability, but academic studies disagree on the empirical evidence of the TAF effect on Libor. We show that the disagreement arises from misspecifications of econometric models. Regressions using the daily level of the Libor-OIS spread as the dependent variable miss either the permanent or temporary TAF effect, depending on whether the dummy variable indicates the events of the TAF or the regimes before and after a TAF event. Those regressions also suffer from the unit-root problem and produce unreliable test statistics. By contrast, regressions using the daily change in the Libor-OIS spread are robust to the persistence of the TAF effect and the unit-root problem, consistently producing reliable evidence that the downward shifts of the Libor-OIS spread were associated with the TAF. The evidence indicates the efficacy of the TAF in helping the interbank market to relieve liquidity strains.

Suggested Citation

  • McAndrews, James J. & Sarkar, Asani & Wang, Zhenyu, 2008. "The effect of the Term Auction Facility on the London inter-bank offered rate," Staff Reports 335, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, revised 01 Jan 2017.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:335
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr335.html
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr335.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Olivier Armantier & Sandra C. Krieger & James J. McAndrews, 2008. "The Federal Reserve's Term Auction Facility," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 14(Jul).
    2. Della Corte, Pasquale & Sarno, Lucio & Thornton, Daniel L., 2008. "The expectation hypothesis of the term structure of very short-term rates: Statistical tests and economic value," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(1), pages 158-174, July.
    3. John B. Taylor & John C. Williams, 2009. "A black swan in the money market," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Jan.
    4. Armantier, Olivier & Ghysels, Eric & Sarkar, Asani & Shrader, Jeffrey, 2015. "Discount window stigma during the 2007–2008 financial crisis," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(2), pages 317-335.
    5. Acharya, Viral V. & Skeie, David, 2011. "A model of liquidity hoarding and term premia in inter-bank markets," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(5), pages 436-447.
    6. Gefang, Deborah & Koop, Gary & Potter, Simon M., 2011. "Understanding liquidity and credit risks in the financial crisis," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 18(5), pages 903-914.
    7. Bengt Holmstrom & Jean Tirole, 1998. "Private and Public Supply of Liquidity," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(1), pages 1-40, February.
    8. Longstaff, Francis A., 1989. "A nonlinear general equilibrium model of the term structure of interest rates," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(2), pages 195-224, August.
    9. Abrantes-Metz, Rosa M. & Kraten, Michael & Metz, Albert D. & Seow, Gim S., 2012. "Libor manipulation?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 136-150.
    10. Efraim Benmelech, 2012. "An Empirical Analysis of the Fed's Term Auction Facility," NBER Working Papers 18304, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Andrew Kuritzkes & Til Schuermann & Scott Weiner, 2005. "Deposit Insurance and Risk Management of the U.S. Banking System: What is the Loss Distribution Faced by the FDIC?," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 27(3), pages 217-242, September.
    12. Suresh Sundaresan & Zhenyu Wang, 2006. "Y2K options and the liquidity premium in Treasury bond markets," Staff Reports 266, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    13. Longstaff, Francis A, 1990. " Time Varying Term Premia and Traditional Hypotheses about the Term Structure," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 45(4), pages 1307-1314, September.
    14. Longstaff, Francis A., 2000. "The term structure of very short-term rates: New evidence for the expectations hypothesis," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(3), pages 397-415, December.
    15. Jean Tirole, 2006. "The Theory of Corporate Finance," Post-Print hal-00173191, HAL.
    16. Duffie, Darrell & Huang, Ming, 1996. " Swap Rates and Credit Quality," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(3), pages 921-949, July.
    17. Suresh Sundaresan & Zhenyu Wang, 2009. "Y2K Options and the Liquidity Premium in Treasury Markets," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(3), pages 1021-1056, March.
    18. François-Louis Michaud & Christian Upper, 2008. "What drives interbank rates? Evidence from the Libor panel," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Libor; liquidity; money markets; Term Auction Facility;

    JEL classification:

    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G19 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Other

    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:fednsr:335. 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: (Amy Farber). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.