Further evidence on the rationality of interest rate expectations

This paper extends the limited work on interest rate expectations to a previously unexploited data set that covers a broad range of EMS and non-EMS foreign currency deposits. We corroborate the earlier finding in the literature that interest rate forecasts are not rational and that agents do not use all available information in an efficient manner; this finding applies to the post-1990 period, thus questioning the assertion of Frankel and Froot [Frankel, J.F., Froot, K.A., 1987a. Using survey data to test standard propositions regarding exchange rate expectations. American Economic Review 77, 151] that “the nature of the rejection of rational expectations strongly depends on the sample period”. Although forecast errors on EMS rates are smaller and less volatile than errors on non-EMS rates, expectations on EMS rates are nevertheless biased.     

A comparison of the information in the LIBOR and CMT term structures of interest rates

We investigate the information contained in the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and the U.S. Constant Maturity Treasury (CMT) term structure of interest rates and report three novel findings. First, we document that the information contained in term structures are significantly different from one another. Second, we provide evidence of a significant change in the nature of this difference as the financial crisis began. Third, we find that the significant changes in the information content of CMT and LIBOR are consistent with significant shocks to credit default swap rates and tenor swap rates.     

Time-varying term premium in T-bill futures rate and the expectations hypothesis

This paper examines time-varying term premium in the T-bill futures rate to determine its significance for the expectations hypothesis (EH). Similar to previous studies on the T-bill forward rates, our data reject the joint hypothesis of the EH and the rational expectations hypothesis (RE). Under the assumption of zero rational expectational error, we find a substantial variation of term premium in the futures rate over time. Furthermore, the lower bound of the expected term premium variance is significantly positive when the rational expectational error is allowed to be nonzero. These findings are inconsistent with the EH. In addition, a relatively high ratio of the lower bound of the expected term premium variance to the prediction error variance implies that the poor predictive power of the futures rate should not be attributed mainly to the market's rational expectational errors.     

The information in the term structure of German interest rates

This paper tests the Expectations Hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates using new data for Germany. The German term structure appears to forecast future short-term interest rates surprisingly well, compared with previous studies with US data, while it has lower predictive power for long-term interest rates. However, the direction suggested by the coefficient estimates is consistent with that implied by the EH, that is when the term spread widens, long rates increase. The use of instrumental variables to deal with possible measurement errors in the data significantly improves regressions for the long rates. Moreover, re-estimation with proxy variables to account for the possibility of time-varying term premia confirms that the evolution of both short and long rates corresponds to the predictions of the EH and that most of the information is in the term spread. These results are important as they suggest that monetary policy in Germany could be guided by the slope of the term structure.     

A term structure model of interest rates with quadratic volatility

This study proposes a no-arbitrage term structure model that can capture the volatility of interest rates without sacrificing the goodness-of-fit to the cross-section and predictive ability about the level of interest rates. The key feature of the model is the covariance matrix of changes in factors, which is specified as quadratic functions of factors. The quadratic specification can capture intense volatility even with spanned factors, which is not the case for the affine specification. Furthermore, since the quadratic specification guarantees the positive definiteness of the covariance matrix without restricting the sign of factors, it allows for a flexible specification of the physical drift as does the Gaussian term structure model, contributing also to accurate level prediction.     

International interest rates and US monetary policy announcements: Evidence from Hong Kong and Singapore

This paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to US monetary policy announcements for the US and two emerging economies, Hong Kong and Singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years. Our results, based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates, document that FOMC announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the US and both Asian countries. Further, international interest rate differentials around FOMC meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases. Finally, for the case of Singapore, we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements. These results are robust to time-varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations.     

VIX futures term structure and the expectations hypothesis

Tests of the expectations hypothesis reveal that the slope of the VIX futures term structure predicts the direction but not the magnitude of the evolution of the short-end of the curve, but predicts neither the direction nor the magnitude of short-term changes in the long-end of the curve. Relative value seeking spread trades, constructed to exploit such violations, deliver excess returns with annualized Sharpe ratios equal or greater than those of volatility-writing strategies deployed by VIX ETN's for a majority of the 32 spread trade combinations tested. I demonstrate that profits from beta-neutral variations of the spread trades, which are not compensation for taking on equity downside risk by design, are propagated by inflows of capital into VIX futures markets, after controlling for factors that measure changes in the availability of hedge fund capital, risk appetite, and momentum. At the heart of profits, and by extension the term structure anomalies, is a disproportionally elevated basis propagated by long VIX demand that enters the futures market through ETN channels.     

Expectations Hypothesis of the Term Structure of Implied Volatility: Evidence from Foreign Currency and Stock Index Options

Using a stochastic volatility option pricing model, we showthat the implied volatilities of at-the-money options are notnecessarily unbiased and that the fixed interval time-seriescan produce misleading results. Our results do not support theexpectations hypothesis: long-term volatilities rise relativeto short-term volatilities, but the increases are not matchedas predicted by the expectations hypothesis. In addition, anincrease in the current long-term volatility relative to thecurrent short-term volatility is followed by a subsequent decline.The results are similar for both foreign currency and the S&P500 stock index options.     

Interest rate risk of German financial institutions: the impact of level,slope, and curvature of the term structure

We investigate here the sensitivity of the equity values of a large sample of German financial institutions to movements in the term structure of interest rates. While similar approaches rely on a single interest rate factor only, we quantify the exposure to changes in level, slope, and curvature, which are the driving factors of term structure changes. Our main findings are: (i) banks and insurances are exposed to level and curvature changes but only marginally to slope movements; (ii) the interest rate risk exposure depends on the banking sector investigated; (iii) level and curvature changes are priced in the cross-section of stock returns.

The value of convexity: a theoretical and empirical investigation

We explore from a theoretical and an empirical perspective the value of convexity in the US Treasury market. We present a quasi-model-agnostic approach that is rooted in the existence of some affine model capable of recovering with good accuracy the market yield curve and covariance matrix. As we show, at least one such model exists, and this is all we require for our results to hold. We show that, as a consequence, the theoretical ‘value of convexity’ purely depends on observable features of the yield curve, and on statistically determinable yield volatilities. We then address the question of whether the theoretical convexity is indeed correctly reflected in the shape of the yield curve. We present empirical results about the predictive power of a strategy based on the discrepancies between the theoretical and the predicted value of convexity. By looking at 30 years of data, we find that neither the strategy of being systematically long or short convexity (and immunized against ‘level’ and ‘slope’ risk) would have been profitable. However, a conditional strategy that looks at the difference between the ‘implied’ and the statistically estimated value of convexity would have identified extended periods during which the proposed approach would have delivered attractive Sharpe Ratios.     

Convexity theory for the term structure equation

We study the convexity and model parameter monotonicity properties for prices of bonds and bond options when the short rate is modeled by a diffusion process. We provide sharp conditions on the model parameters under which the convexity of the price in the short rate is guaranteed. Under these conditions, the price is decreasing in the drift and increasing in the volatility of the short rate. We also study the convexity properties of the logarithm of the price and find simple conditions on the coefficients that guarantee that the price is log-convex or log-concave.      

The value of relationship banking: International evidence

This paper analyses whether repeated borrowing from the same bank affects loan contract terms. We find that relationship loans pay less spread and require less collateral compared to non-relationship loans. These effects for relationship loans are not derived from differences between relationship and nonrelationship loans. The reduction of interest rate spread for relationship loans disappeared during the financial crisis. The results also reveal that borrowers paid higher interest rate spreads, had to post more collateral and the maturity was shortened during the crisis period. The reduction in interest rate spread and collateral depends on the protection of creditors’ rights. In countries where creditors’ rights are well protected, relationship loans pay less spread and are required to post less collateral than relationship loans in countries with weak protection of creditors’ rights.     

中国金融市场通胀预期——基于利率期限结构的量度

通胀预期量度在以通胀预期为导向的货币政策中的意义重大。本文利用卡尔曼滤波法将离散时间两因子无套利广义高斯仿射模型运用于我国银行间债券市场,第一次从中国国债收益率曲线中分解出金融市场的中长期通胀预期L。将L与居民通胀预期和经济学家通胀预期比较,发现从事前看,L优于经济学家通胀预期,稍逊于居民通胀预期;从事后看,L优于居民通胀预期,稍逊于经济学家通胀预期。综合看,L作为金融市场形成的、高频的、反映中长期通胀的预期指数,对货币政策制定具有现实的参考意义。     

Information in the U.S. Treasury Term Structure of Interest Rates

We provide evidence of a significant change in the information content of the U.S. Treasury term structure of interest rates over the last 20 years. We apply a regression approach to measure the information in forward interest rates and introduce both a curve fitting method and an alternative data source. We find more information in the recent U.S. Treasury term structure about future interest rates than about expected holding period returns. These results document a significant departure from prior empirical findings.     

Macroeconomic releases and the interest rate term structure

We extract two systematic economic factors from a wide array of noisy and sparsely observed macroeconomic releases, and link the dynamics and market prices of the two factors to the interest rate term structure. The two factors predict 77.9–82.1% of the daily variation in LIBOR and swap rates from one month to 10 years. Shocks on inflation-related releases have large, positive impacts on interest rates of all maturities, leading to parallel shifts of the yield curve, but shocks on output-related releases have larger impacts on the short rate than on the long rate, thus generating a slope effect.     

The volatility term structure in a lognormal process for the short rate

One-factor Markov models are widely used by practitioners for pricing financial options. Their simplicity facilitates their calibration to the intial conditions and permits fast computer Implementations. Nevertheless, the danger remains that such models behave unrealistically, if the calibration of the volatility is not properly done. Here, we study a lognormal process and investigate how to specify the volatility constraints in such a way that the term structure of volatility at future times, as implied by the short rate process, has a realistic and stable shape. However, the drifting down of the volatility term structure is unavoidable. As a result, there is a tendency to underestimate option prices.     

Analyzing interest rate risk: Stochastic volatility in the term structure of government bond yields

We propose a Nelson–Siegel type interest rate term structure model where the underlying yield factors follow autoregressive processes with stochastic volatility. The factor volatilities parsimoniously capture risk inherent to the term structure and are associated with the time-varying uncertainty of the yield curve’s level, slope and curvature. Estimating the model based on US government bond yields applying Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques we find that the factor volatilities follow highly persistent processes. We show that yield factors and factor volatilities are closely related to macroeconomic state variables as well as the conditional variances thereof.     

Continuous-time term structure models: Forward measure approach

The problem of term structure of interest rates modelling is considered in a continuous-time framework. The emphasis is on the bond prices, forward bond prices and so-called LIBOR rates, rather than on the instantaneous continuously compounded rates as in most traditional models. Forward and spot probability measures are introduced in this general set-up. Two conditions of no-arbitrage between bonds and cash are examined. A process of savings account implied by an arbitrage-free family of bond prices is identified by means of a multiplicative decomposition of semimartingales. The uniqueness of an implied savings account is established under fairly general conditions. The notion of a family of forward processes is introduced, and the existence of an associated arbitrage-free family of bond prices is examined. A straightforward construction of a lognormal model of forward LIBOR rates, based on the backward induction, is presented.     

Forecasting GDP growth with financial market data in Finland: Revisiting stylized facts in a small open economy during the financial crisis

This paper examines the ability of financial variables to predict future economic growth above and beyond past economic activity in a small open economy in the euro area. We aim to clarify potential differences in forecasting economic activity during different economic circumstances.Our results from Finland suggest that the proper choice of forecasting variables is related to general economic conditions. During steady economic growth, the preferred choice for a financial indicator is the short-term interest rate combined with past values of output growth. However, during economic turbulence, the traditional term spread and stock returns are more important in forecasting GDP growth. The time-varying predictive content of the financial variables may be utilized by applying regime-switching nonlinear forecasting models. We propose a novel application using the negative term spread and observed recession as signals to switch between regimes. This procedure yields a significant improvement in forecasting performance at the one-year forecast horizon.