"Deposits held at Federal Reserve Banks are an essential input to the business activity of most depository institutions in the United States. Managing these deposits is an important and complex inventory problem, for two reasons. First, Federal Reserve regulations require that depository...

Since the early 1990s, commercial banks have turned to Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLBank) advances to plug the gap between loan and deposit growth. Is this trend worrisome? On the one hand, advances implicitly encourage risk by insulating borrowers from market discipline. On the other, advances...