"We use forecast errors made by the Federal Reserve while preparing open market operations to identify a liquidity effect at a daily frequency in the federal funds market. Unlike Hamilton (1997), we find a liquidity effect on many days of the reserve maintenance period besides settlement day....

Graph-theoretic methods of causal search based on the ideas of Pearl (2000), Spirtes et al. (2000), and others have been applied by a number of researchers to economic data, particularly by Swanson and Granger (1997) to the problem of finding a data-based contemporaneous causal order for the...

The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the Federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the Federal funds rate...