It is widely believed that the Fed controls the funds rate by altering the degree of pressure in the reserve market through open market operations when it changes its target for the federal funds rate. Recently, however, several economists have suggested that open market operations may not be...

This paper presents a history of the primary dealer system from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper focuses on two formal programs: the "recognized" dealer program adopted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1939 and the "qualified" dealer program adopted by the Federal Open...

This paper presents a business cycle analysis of monetary policy shocks measured by disturbances to open market operations, i.e. the ratio of open market papers to non-borrowed reserves. We find empirical evidence for the usefulness of this policy measure, as it predicts significant declines in...

This paper describes the evolution of Federal Reserve participation in public Treasury offerings. It covers the pre-1935 period, when the Fed participated on an equal footing with other investors in exchange offerings priced by Treasury officials, to its present-day practice of reinvesting the...

I build a general equilibrium model of the transmission of monetary policy on bank lending. Bank lending is done by individual banks that face random investment opportunities by creating inside money. Banks are subject to a reserve requirement and have access to the interbank money market. The...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of central bank purchases of government bonds by investigating the following three questions: Under what conditions are these purchases socially desirable, what incentive problems do they mitigate, and how large are these...

Open market operations play a key role in allocating central bank funds to the banking system and thereby to steer short-term interest rates in line with the stance of monetary policy. Many central banks apply so-called "fixed rate tender" auctions in their open market operations. This note...

Monetary policy is superneutral in an overlapping generations model. Previous authors have argued that superneutrality does not hold in such a setting. However, the standard results rely on the counter-factual premise of helicopter money and are overturned if money creation through open market...

This paper examines the efforts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to first control, and later decontrol, the level and shape of the Treasury yield curve in the 1940s. The paper begins with a brief review of monetary policy in 1938 and a description of the period between September 1939...