Depository disintermediation and the equilibrium quantity of money market mutual funds

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-1991

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between market interest rates and the number of money market mutual funds offered from 1971/IV to 1984/IV. The quantity of MMMFs was influenced by the growing gap between market rates and highly regulated explicit rates on commercial bank liquid deposits during this period. A reduced form of the equilibrium quantity of MMMFs is estimated for two theories. One is a peak-rate specification to test whether a sufficiently high interest rate triggers a greater number of MMMFs. The second specification tests whether the number of MMMFs is influenced by a spectrum of market interest rates, as suggested by a distributed-lag scheme. The empirical results show that certain peak-rate specifications outperform the distributed-lag specification, lending support to the notion that the equilibrium quantity of MMMFs varies in a ratchet-like fashion.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/0148-6195(91)90023-P

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