Modelling Federal Reserve Discount Policy

  • Authors:
  • Christopher F. Baum;Meral Karasulu

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Economics, Boston College, Chestnut Hill MA 02167, USA. e-mail: baum@bc.edu.;Bogaziçi University

  • Venue:
  • Computational Economics
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

We employ threshold cointegration methodology to model the policy problem solved by the Federal Reserve System in their manipulation of the discount rate under a reserves target operating procedure utilized since October 1979. The infrequent and discrete adjustments that characterize movements in the discount rate instrument vis-a-vis theFederal Funds rate do not lend themselves to a linear cointegration framework. The inherently nonlinear relationshiparising from the Fed‘s self-imposed constraints on discontinuously changing the discount rate is satisfactorilymodelled as an instance of threshold cointegration between the discount rate and the Federal Funds rate.