We study the long standing issue of whether markets can supply banks with sufficient liquidity or whether markets should be complemented with a lender of last resort (LOLR). For this purpose, we develop an extended version of the recent model of Holmström and Tirole (1998) on the supply of...

Averaging the reserve requirement is often considered an efficient way to reduce volatility at the very short end of the money market yield curve. The Bank of Finland began to apply an averaging provision at the beginning of October 1995. Notably, the volatility of the overnight rate of interest...

We study the effects of the ECB monetary policy and the European crisis resolution policies on the 10 year sovereign bond yields of seven European countries. We find that some of the decisions have had significant impact on sovereign bond yields and have succeeded in reducing stress in the...

This publication consists of fifteen studies on payment and settlement systems conducted using computational or simulation techniques. The studies have been presented at the simulator seminars arranged by the Bank of Finland during the years 2009–2011. The main focus of the studies is on the...

This study utilises payment system data to analyse market participants’ liquidity usage and to trace interest rates paid on overnight loans. Our aim is to examine how liquidity usage has changed during the years 2006–2/2011 and to combine this information with data on overnight lending rates...

The operating speed of a payment system depends on the stage of technology of the system's communication and information processing environment. Frequent intraday processing cycles and real-time processing have introduced new means of speeding up the processing and settlement of payments. In a...

In the Eurosystem, banks’ interest rate expectations should no longer have resulted in a non-zero tender spread, the difference between marginal and minimum price for liquidity, when the ECB reformed its op-erational framework for monetary policy implementation in March 2004 so that the policy...

We sketch a theoretical framework for comparing the properties of funded LOLR schemes. We construct an idealized lender of last resort and investigate how it formulates policy under alternative public and private governance structures. The alternatives are a (first-best) social utility maximizer...

The simulation technique provides a new means for analysing complex interdependencies in payment and securities settlement processing. The Bank of Finland has developed a payment and settlement system simulator (BoF-PSS2) that can be used for constructing simulation models of payment and...

In this paper, I develop a model that addresses the links between banks’ liquidity outlook and their incentives to take credit risk. Assuming that both bank-specific liquidity shocks and credit losses are necessary to provoke bank runs, the model predicts that a bank’s incentives to mitigate...