Year-end and quarter-end effects in the term structure of sterling repo and Eurepo rates

Abstract

Griffiths and Winters [Griffiths, M., Winters, D., 1997. On a preferred habitat for liquidity at the turn-of-the-year: evidence from the term-repo market, Journal of Financial Services Research 12, 21–38] find a year-end preferred habitat for liquidity for US repo rates, and, later [Griffiths, M., Winters, D., 2005. The-turn-of-the-year in money markets: tests of the riskshifting window dressing and preferred habitat hypotheses, Journal of Business 78, 1337–1364] find a similar preferred habitat for US money market instruments. Kotomin et al. [Kotomin, V., Smith, S., Winters, D., 2008. Preferred habitat for liquidity in international shortterm interest rates, Journal of Banking and Finance 32, 240–250] document the preferred habitat in LIBOR for the major world currencies, excluding the British pound. We examine the robustness of these results using pound sterling and euro repo rates and find a year-end preferred habitat for liquidity in the euro repo rates. The British interest rates continue to behave differently, and we provide a possible explanation as to why this occurs.