A characteristic feature of U.S. monetary policy has been the active targeting of the overnight fed funds rate by the Federal Reserve. We show that during the 1989-1996 period, in spite of the effective targeting of the overnight fed funds rate, term fed funds rates displayed volatile and...

We explore the link between the overnight fed funds rate, which is actively targeted by the Federal Reserve, and longer-maturity term fed funds rates. We develop a term-structure model which explicitly accounts for interest rate targeting and for the predictability of future target changes. The...

We explore the effects of overnight-rate targeting on nominal interest rates of longer maturities. In a realistic model of noisy targeting and infrequent target changes, expectations of future policy actions introduce persistent spreads between interest rates of different maturities. Some...

In one-factor models, such as Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (1985) or Vasicek (1977), the conditional mean of the instantaneous rate changes with its current level. This paper gathers evidence that the conditional mean of the one- month rate explains variations in bond yields of different maturities,...

We assume the short-term rate to revert towards a central tendency which in, turn, is stochastically changing over time. We impose minimal restrictions on the joint behavior of the short-term rate and the central-tendency factor, and derive implications for the term structure of interest rates....

We assume that the instantaneous riskless rate reverts towards a central tendency which, in turn, is changing stochastically over time, and we derive a model of the term structure of interest rates. Our term-structure model implies that a linear combination of any two rates can be used as a...

We assume that the instantaneous riskless rate reverts toward a central tendency which, in turn, is changing stochastically over time. As a result, current short-term rates are not sufficient to predict future short-term rates movements, as it would be the case if the central tendency was...

A price barrier is a price level at which a large number of investors either buy or sell securities. We analyze the dynamics of asset prices in an economy in which price barriers exist. Our analysis suggests that asset prices and volatility can exhibit jumps when the price barrier is reached....

In a variety of realistic scenarios, some investors trade infrequently rather than continuously, basing their buy or sell decisions on current price levels. A quot;price barrierquot; is a price level at which a large number of investors either buy or sell securities. We analyze the dynamics of...

Real money balances are held separately for consumption and portfolio reasons. When real balances are a state variable in the investor s optimization problem, there is a specific inflation-hedging portfolio. An investor hedges against inflation when the effect of real money holdings on the...