We explore the effects of official targeting policy on the term-structure of nominal interest rates, adapting relevant insights from theoretical work on "peso problems" to account for realistic infrequency of target changes. Our analysis of daily U.S. interest rates and newly available...

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 find that in 1989-1996, when U.S. monetary policy tightly targeted overnight fed funds rates, the volatility and persistence of spreads between target and term fed funds levels were larger for longer-maturity loans. We show that such patterns are consistent with an expectational model where...