This paper examines how workers use 401(k) plans by examining their participation, contribution, and withdrawal decisions. Sixty-five percent of eligible workers participate in 401(k) plans. Employee participation rises with income, age, job tenure, and education. While participation also rises...

Empirical research over the last decade has uncovered predictive relationships between the slope of the yield curve and subsequent real activity and inflation. Some of these relationships are highly significant, but their theoretical motivations suggest that they may not be stable over time. We...

Some recent time-series applications use probit models to measure the forecasting power of a set of variables. Correct inferences about the significance of the variables requires a consistent estimator of the covariance matrix of the estimated model coefficients. A potential source of...

This paper studies the effects of a recent tick size reduction in the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find significantly narrower bid-ask spreads, increased trading activity, improveddepth within one old tick despite lower overall market depth, and improved price efficiency.Moreover, slow...

Ongoing regulatory reform efforts aim to make the over-the-counter derivatives market more transparent by introducing public reporting of transaction-level information, including price and volume of trades. However, to date there has been a scarcity of data on the structure of trading in this...

This paper examines the Federal Reserve's unprecedented liquidity provision during the financial crisis of 2007-2009. It first reviews how the Fed provides liquidity in normal times. It then explains how the Fed's new and expanded liquidity facilities were intended to enable the central bank to...

This paper examines the over-the-counter (OTC) interest rate derivatives (IRD) market in order to inform the design of post-trade price reporting. Our analysis uses a novel transaction-level data set to examine trading activity, the composition of market participants, levels of product...

The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) was introduced by the Federal Reserve to promote liquidity in the financing markets for Treasury and other collateral. We evaluate one aspect of the program - the extent to which it has narrowed repo spreads between Treasury collateral and less liquid...

We characterize the microstructure of the market for Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) using novel tick data from the interdealer market. We find a marked difference in trading activity between on-the-run and off-the-run securities, as in the nominal Treasury securities market. We...

Although China now has one of the largest government bond markets in the world, the market has received relatively little attention and analysis. We describe the history and structure of the market and assess its functioning. We find that trading in individual bonds was historically sparse but...