This study puts forth stationarity considerations in explaining the observed breakdown between aggregate Discount Window borrowing and the spread between the Federal Funds rate and the discount rate during the post-1987 period. Tests with biweekly data indicate stationarity for adjustment borrowing, but cannot reject the unit root for the spread. The Goodfriend–Dutkowsky dynamic implicit cost formulation can accommodate the contrasting stationarity properties. Structural restrictions are compatible with stationary borrowing and a stationary or near integrated spread. While empirical findings from the static model indicate greater bank reluctance to borrow over time, the dynamic model gives considerably less support.

A key rationale offered by the Federal Reserve for the payment of interest on reserves was to remove the incentive for banks to operate sweep accounts. Sweeping shifts funds from transactions deposits subject to reserve requirements to non-reservable deposits. This paper extends a conventional banking model to analyze sweeping behavior. Sweeping responds positively to increases in bank loan rates and reserve ratios and negatively to increases in the interest rate on reserves or exogenous increases in bank equity. Sweeping generates greater responsiveness in lending to changes in loan rates or the interest rate on reserves and lower responsiveness to changes in reserve ratios or equity than in its absence. Empirical analysis of an explicit condition that we derive suggests that, with an unchanged reserve requirement, the Fed could eliminate sweeping by setting the interest rate on reserves to no less than approximately 4% points below the market loan rate.

This paper examines the market-price to book-value ratio for 6604 bank stock observations from December 31, 2006 through June 30, 2009. We relate each bank’s market-price to book-value ratio to several fundamental ratios and whether the bank took funds from the US Treasury under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The results of this study show that banks who took TARP funds have lower market-price to book-value ratios. In addition, lower relative costs, higher non-interest income, and lower assets in non-accrual or foreclosed status are associated with higher market-price to book-value ratios while controlling for size and other bank attributes.

This paper examines the admissibility of monetary aggregate groupings for the US over 1993–2001, based upon weak separability. We investigate the impact of retail and commercial demand deposit sweep programs on the separability of monetary asset groupings. Weak separability is tested using the Swofford–Whitney and Fleissig–Whitney tests. We use Varian's measurement error adjustment procedure to eliminate violations of the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP). When funds from both retail and commercial demand deposit sweep programs are placed within checkable deposits, all groupings, narrow and broad, pass GARP and weak separability. For groupings based on conventional money measures, tests tend to favor broad aggregates.