Money, banking, and monetary policy

An important function of banks is to issue liabilities, like demand deposits, that are relatively safe and liquid. We introduce a risk of theft and a safe-keeping role for banks into modern monetary theory. This provides a general equilibrium framework for analyzing banking in historical and contemporary contexts. The model can generate the concurrent circulation of cash and bank liabilities as media of exchange, or inside and outside money. It also yields novel policy implications. For example, negative nominal interest rates are feasible, and for some parameters optimal; for other parameters, strictly positive nominal rates are optimal.     

A mean-variance framework for analyzing reserve requirements and monetary control

This paper analyzes an ‘almost’ contemporaneous reserve accounting system (ACRA) in which reserve computation and maintenance periods only partially overlap. As a result, banks acquire knowledge of their required reserve obligations prior to the settling period when such reserve requirements become legally binding. Our analysis suggests that the money stock behaves similarly under both ACRA and purely contemporaneous reserve accounting systems as long as banks are risk averse. When banks no longer exhibit risk aversion, the ACRA money stock tends to mimic the behavior of the money stock under a lagged reserve accounting system.     

Did the Reserve Requirement Increases of 1936–37 Reduce Bank Lending? Evidence from a Quasi‐Experiment

We analyze the impact of contractionary monetary policy through increases in reserve requirements on bank lending. We compare the lending behavior of banks that were subject to the requirement increases in 1936–37, Federal Reserve member banks, to a group of banks that were not subject to the reserve increase, Federal Reserve nonmember banks. After implementing the difference‐in‐difference estimators, we find that the increases in reserve requirements did not create financing constraints for member banks and lead them to reduce lending. Therefore, the actions of the Federal Reserve concerning the required reserve ratios cannot be blamed for instigating the economic downturn of 1937–38.     

存款准备金政策与货币供给

存款准备金政策通常被认为是中央银行调控货币供给的有效工具。但是,从理论和实践可以证明,这一政策工具对货币供给的影响是很有限的。在商业银行有充裕的超额准备金时,法定准备金比率的调整只改变商业银行的准备金构成,而不改变准备金的总额,因而对基础货币和货币乘数都没有影响,或影响都很小;而当商业银行没有超额准备金或只有很少超额准备金时,法定准备金比率的上调将使准备金总额增加,从而使货币乘数缩小,但使基础货币增加。于是,货币乘数缩小对货币供给的影响将被基础货币增加对货币供给的影响所抵消。     

Equilibrium Dynamics in an Endogenous Growth Model of Money and Banking

We construct an analytically tractable endogenous growth model of money and banking where money provides "liquidity services" to facilitate transactions and banks convert non-reserve deposits into productive capital. We examine both the long- and short-run effects of changes in the money growth rate or the reserve requirement ratio. In response to a change in the required reserve ratio, the inflation rate and the growth rates of capital, real balances, and consumption need not adjust monotonically along the transition path. While the balanced growth equilibrium may be either a saddle or a source locally, the global dynamical system exhibits flip bifurcation.     

Aggregate uncertainty, money and banking

This paper addresses the problem of monitoring the monitor in a model of money and banking with private information and aggregate uncertainty. There is no need to monitor a bank if it requires loans to be repaid partly with money. A market arises at the repayment stage and generates information-revealing prices that perfectly discipline the bank. This mechanism also applies when there exist multiple banks. With multiple banks, competition of private monies improves welfare. A prohibition on private money issue not only eliminates money competition but also triggers free-rider problems among banks, which is detrimental to welfare.     

Reserve Requirements,Liquidity Risk,and Bank Lending Behavior

Although reserve requirements (RR) have been used in emerging markets to smooth credit cycles, the transmission mechanism remains blurry. Using bank‐level data, we unveil the interaction of RR with bank lending. We identify a new channel that works through a decline in banks’ liquid assets and loan supply due to an increase in RR. “Quantitative tightening” through RR raises the short‐term funding needs of the banking system, which is met by collateralized central bank lending, thus depleting banks’ unencumbered liquid assets. Our results suggest that such a shift in bank liquidity is associated with a significant change in lending.     

Interest rate corridors and reserves

This paper evaluates reserves regimes versus interest rate corridors, which have become competing frameworks for monetary policy implementation. Rate corridors, relying on lending and deposit facilities to create ceilings and floors for overnight interest rates, evince mixed results on controlling volatility. Reserve requirements allow period-average smoothing of interest rates but, even if remunerated, are subject to reserve avoidance activities. A system of voluntary, period-average reserve commitments could offer equivalent rate-smoothing advantages. If central banks created symmetric opportunity costs of meeting or falling short of period-average reserve requirements (or commitments), they could achieve flat reserve demand on settlement day.     

A Model of QE,Reserve Demand,and the Money Multiplier

Quantitative easing (QE) programs have driven unprecedented expansions in the supply of central bank reserves around the world over the past two decades, fundamentally changing the implementation of monetary policy. The collapse in money multipliers following QE episodes has often been interpreted as implying banks are happy to passively hold most of the reserves created by QE. This paper develops a simple microsimulation model of the banking sector that adapts the traditional money multiplier model and allows for bank reserve demand to be inferred from monetary aggregates. The model allows the use of unwanted reserves by banks to play out over time alongside QE purchases and incorporates both significantly higher reserve demand after 2008 and capital constraints. With these additions, the model explains the persistently lower money multipliers seen in the United States following QE, as well as the growth in commercial bank deposits. The model suggests the demand from banks for reserves has increased substantially since the introduction of QE but not to the point where banks are passively absorbing all newly created reserves.     

Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence

This paper presents the first empirical evidence in the history of banking on the question of whether banks can create money out of nothing. The banking crisis has revived interest in this issue, but it had remained unsettled. Three hypotheses are recognised in the literature. According to the financial intermediation theory of banking, banks are merely intermediaries like other non-bank financial institutions, collecting deposits that are then lent out. According to the fractional reserve theory of banking, individual banks are mere financial intermediaries that cannot create money, but collectively they end up creating money through systemic interaction. A third theory maintains that each individual bank has the power to create money ‘out of nothing’ and does so when it extends credit (the credit creation theory of banking). The question which of the theories is correct has far-reaching implications for research and policy. Surprisingly, despite the longstanding controversy, until now no empirical study has tested the theories. This is the contribution of the present paper. An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks individually, "out of thin air".     

On money and output: Is money redundant?

There is an emerging consensus that money can be largely ignored in making monetary policy decisions. Rudebusch and Svensson [1999, Policy Rules and Inflation Targeting. In Taylor, J.B. (Ed.), Monetary Policy Rules. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 203-246; 2002, Eurosystem Monetary Targeting: Lessons from US Data. European Economic Review 46, 417-442] provide some empirical support for this view. We reconsider the role of money and find that money is not redundant. More specifically, there is a significant statistical relationship between lagged values of money and the output gap, even when lagged values of real interest rates and lagged values of the output gap are accounted for. We also find that inside and outside money provide significant information in predicting movements in the output gap.     

Deregulation and oligopolistic rivalry in bank deposit markets

This paper provides a partial equilibrium analysis of a deregulated market for bank deposits in which banks behave oligopolistically but entry and exit are freely permitted. It is demonstrated that the effects of variations in market interest rates, reserve requirements, and bank cost and demand conditions upon the market quantity of bank deposit money are fundamentally altered if the degree of bank rivalry adjusts endogenously. Hence, banking deregulation may produce significant changes in the relationships between these variables and the stock of deposit money.     

Bank Mergers, Competition, and Liquidity

We model the impact of bank mergers on loan competition, reserve holdings, and aggregate liquidity. A merger changes the distribution of liquidity shocks and creates an internal money market, leading to financial cost efficiencies and more precise estimates of liquidity needs. The merged banks may increase their reserve holdings through an internalization effect or decrease them because of a diversification effect. The merger also affects loan market competition, which in turn modifies the distribution of bank sizes and aggregate liquidity needs. Mergers among large banks tend to increase aggregate liquidity needs and thus the public provision of liquidity through monetary operations of the central bank.     

电子货币对存款准备金制度的冲击效应研究

本文以电子货币为视角,将电子货币引入存款准备金制度的理论分析框架,在理论分析及对传统货币模型修正的基础上,选择电子货币与存款准备金政策相关的变量,建立数量经济模型。通过统计检验发现：电子货币放大了货币乘数,并使货币乘数变得不稳定,从而加大了中央银行通过存款准备金政策影响货币乘数来调节商业银行信用创造能力的难度,削弱了存款准备金政策的效率。     

Interest on bank reserves and optimal sweeping

A key rationale offered by the Federal Reserve for the payment of interest on reserves was to remove the incentive for banks to operate sweep accounts. Sweeping shifts funds from transactions deposits subject to reserve requirements to non-reservable deposits. This paper extends a conventional banking model to analyze sweeping behavior. Sweeping responds positively to increases in bank loan rates and reserve ratios and negatively to increases in the interest rate on reserves or exogenous increases in bank equity. Sweeping generates greater responsiveness in lending to changes in loan rates or the interest rate on reserves and lower responsiveness to changes in reserve ratios or equity than in its absence. Empirical analysis of an explicit condition that we derive suggests that, with an unchanged reserve requirement, the Fed could eliminate sweeping by setting the interest rate on reserves to no less than approximately 4% points below the market loan rate.     

Payment obligations,reserve requirements,and the demand for central bank balances

We develop a model in which a bank's demand for reserves depends on the joint distribution of transactions, reserve requirements, and the interest rate. By devoting resources to its liquidity management, a bank can save on costly reserves required to settle its payments on time. We test the model with data from the largest banks in the Swiss Interbank Clearing system. We find that the turnover ratio (the speed with which a bank turns over its reserves in the payment system) depends largely on the aggregate value of its payments. We also find that reserve requirements impose a highly uneven burden on the banks.     

Financial contagion and the role of the central bank

We investigate the role of a central bank (CB) in preventing and avoiding financial contagion. The CB, by imposing reserve requirements on the banking system, trades off the cost of reducing the resources available for long-term investment with the benefit of raising liquidity to face an adverse shock that could cause contagious crises. We argue that contagion is not due to the structure of the interbank deposit market, but to the impossibility to sign contracts contingent on unforeseen contingencies. As long as incomplete contracts are present, the CB may have a useful role in curbing contagion. Moreover, the CB allows the banking system to reach first-best allocation in all the states of the world when the notion of incentive-efficiency is considered. If the analysis is restricted to constrained-efficiency, the CB still avoids contagion without, however, reaching first-best consumption allocation. The model provides a rationale for reserve requirements without the presence of fiat money or asymmetric information.     

Reserve requirements and optimal seigniorage

This note presents a model of optimizing agents who chose to hold deposits at financial intermediaries, which are required to hold fractional reserves of fiat money. When the stock of fiat money is expanded, the reserve requirement functions as a tax on deposits. The combination of reserve requirements and inflation results in a lower steady-state utility than a direct tax on deposits. The optimal monetary policy when reserves are required is to minimize reserve requirements and inflate without limit the stock of fiat money.     

Reconciling Bagehot and the Fed's Response to September 11

Bagehot (1873) states that to prevent bank panics a central bank should provide liquidity at a "very high rate of interest." In contrast, most of the theoretical literature on liquidity provision suggests that central banks should lend at an interest rate of zero. This is broadly consistent with the Federal Reserve's behavior in the days following September 11, 2001. This paper shows that both policies can be reconciled. With commodity money, as in Bagehot's time, liquidity is scarce and a high price allows banks to self-select. In contrast, the Fed has a virtually unlimited ability to temporarily expand the money supply so self-selection is unnecessary.