Academic Research on Breaking the Buck

• US dollarmoneymarketfundsand non-US banks, Baba, N., McCauley, R. N., & Ramaswamy, S. (2009). US dollar money market funds and non-US banks.BIS Quarterly Review, March. The Lehman Brothers failure stressed global interbank and foreign exchange markets because it led to a run on money market funds, the largest suppliers of dollar funding to non-US banks. Policy stopped the run and replaced private with public funding. 
• How effective were the Federal Reserve emergency liquidity facilities? Evidence from the assetbacked commercial papermoneymarketmutual fundliquidity facility, DuyganBump, B., Parkinson, P., Rosengren, E., Suarez, G. A., & Willen, P. (2013). How effective were the Federal Reserve emergency liquidity facilities? Evidence from the assetbacked commercial paper money market mutual fund liquidity facility.The Journal of Finance,68(2), 715-737. The events following Lehman's failure in 2008 and the current turmoil emanating from Europe highlight the structural vulnerabilities of shortterm credit markets and the role of central banks as backstop liquidity providers. The Federal Reserve's response to financial disruptions in the United States importantly included the creation of liquidity facilities. Using a differencesindifferences approach, we evaluate one of the most unusual of these interventionsthe AssetBacked Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. We find that this facility helped stabilize asset outflows from money market funds and reduced assetbacked commercial paper yields significantly. 
• The stability of primemoneymarketmutual funds: sponsor support from 2007 to 2011, Brady, S., Anadu, K., & Cooper, N. (2012). The stability of prime money market mutual funds: sponsor support from 2007 to 2011.Available at SSRN 3015986. It is commonly noted that in the history of the Money Market Mutual Fund (MMMF) industry only two MMMFs have broken the buck, or had the net asset value per share (NAV) at which they transact fall below $1. While this statement is true, it is useful to consider the role that non-contractual support has played in the maintenance of this strong track record. Such support, which has served to obscure the credit risk taken by these funds, has been a common occurrence over the history of MMMFs. This paper presents a detailed view of the non-contractual support provided to MMMFs by their sponsors1 during the recent financial crisis based on an in depth review of public MMMF annual SEC financial statement filings (form N-CSR) with fiscal year-end dates falling between 2007 and 2011. According to our conservative interpretation of this data, we find that at least 21 prime MMMFs would have broken the buck absent a single identified support instance during the most recent financial crisis.2 Further, we identify repeat instances of support (or significant outflows) for some MMMFs during this period such that a total of at least 31 prime MMMFs would have broken the buck when considering the entirety of support activity over the full period.   
• Runs onmoneymarketmutual funds, Schmidt, L., Timmermann, A., & Wermers, R. (2016). Runs on money market mutual funds.American Economic Review,106(9), 2625-57. We study daily money market mutual fund flows at the individual share class level during September 2008. This fine granularity of data allows new insights into investor and portfolio holding characteristics conducive to run risk in cash-like asset pools. We find that cross-sectional flow data observed during the week of the Lehman failure are consistent with key implications of a simple model of coordination with incomplete information and strategic complementarities. Similar conclusions follow from daily models fitted to capture dynamic interactions between investors with differing levels of sophistication within the same money fund, holding constant the underlying portfolio.   
• Why domoney fundmanagers voluntarily waive their fees?, Christoffersen, S. E. (2001). Why do money fund managers voluntarily waive their fees?.The Journal of Finance,56(3), 1117-1140. Over half of money fund managers voluntarily waive fees they have a contractual right to claim. Moreover, as a consequence of fee waivers, funds on average collect one half of reported expense ratios. Variation in fee waivers is significant and relates to differences in relative performance. Both lowperforming retail and institutional funds waive fees to improve their net performance. More interestingly, highperforming retail, but not institutional, funds use fee waivers to strategically adjust net performance to increase expected fund flows. Despite fund flow incentives, highperforming institutional funds do not waive more because they cannot significantly improve their relative performance.