The Welfare Effects of a Liquidity-Saving Mechanism
This paper considers the welfare effect of introducing a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. We study the planner's problem to get a better understanding of the economic role of an LSM and find that an LSM can achieve the planner's allocation for some parameter values. The planner's allocation cannot happen without an LSM, as long as some payments can be delayed without cost. We show that, in equilibrium with an LSM, there can be either too few or too many payments settled early compared with the planner's allocation, depending on the parameter values. Using Fedwire data to calibrate our model, we describe the equilibrium that would arise with an LSM and compare welfare with and without an LSM. Our results suggest that introducing an LSM could have significant benefits.
Forecasting the Intraday Market Price of Money
Market efficiency hypothesis suggests a zero level for the intraday interest rate. However, a liquidity crisis introduces frictions related to news, which can cause an upward jump of the intraday rate. This paper documents that these dynamics can be partially predicted during turbulent times. A long memory approach outperforms random walk and autoregressive benchmarks in terms of point and density forecasting. The gains are particular high when the full distribution is predicted and probabilistic assessments of future movements of the interest rate derived by the model can be used as a policy tool for central banks to plan supplementary market operations during turbulent times. Adding exogenous variables to proxy funding liquidity and counterparty risks does not improve forecast accuracy and the predictability seems to derive from the econometric properties of the series more than from news available to financial markets in realtime.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.