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Discussion Paper
Forecasting Interest Rates over the Long Run
In a previous post, we showed how market rates on U.S. Treasuries violate the expectations hypothesis because of time-varying risk premia. In this post, we provide evidence that term structure models have outperformed direct market-based measures in forecasting interest rates. This suggests that term structure models can play a role in long-run planning for public policy objectives such as assessing the viability of Social Security.
Working Paper
Core and 'Crust': Consumer Prices and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
We propose a no-arbitrage model that jointly explains the dynamics of consumer prices as well as the nominal and real term structures of risk-free rates. In our framework, distinct core, food, and energy price series combine into a measure of total inflation to price nominal Treasuries. This approach captures different frequencies in inflation fluctuations: Shocks to core are more persistent and less volatile than shocks to food and, especially, energy (the 'crust'). We find that a common structure of latent factors determines and predicts the term structure of yields and inflation. The model ...
Working Paper
Term Structure of Interest Rates with Short-run and Long-run Risks
Bond returns are time-varying and predictable. What economic forces drive this variation? To answer this long-standing question, we propose a consumption-based model with recursive preferences, long-run risks, and inflation non-neutrality. Our model offers two important insights. First, our model matches well the post-1990 nominal upward-sloping U.S. Treasury yield curve. Second, consistent with our model's implication, variance risk premium based on the U.S. interest rate derivatives data emerges as a strong predictor for short-horizon Treasury excess returns, above and beyond the predictive ...
Working Paper
Does Realized Volatility Help Bond Yield Density Prediction?
We suggest using "realized volatility" as a volatility proxy to aid in model-based multivariate bond yield density forecasting. To do so, we develop a general estimation approach to incorporate volatility proxy information into dynamic factor models with stochastic volatility. The resulting model parameter estimates are highly efficient, which one hopes would translate into superior predictive performance. We explore this conjecture in the context of density prediction of U.S. bond yields by incorporating realized volatility into a dynamic Nelson-Siegel (DNS) model with stochastic ...
Discussion Paper
Discounting the Long-Run
Expectations about the path of interest rates matter for many economic decisions. Three sources for obtaining information about such expectations are available. The first is extrapolation from historical data. The second consists of surveys of expectations. The third are expectations drawn from financial market prices, often referred to as market expectations. The last are usually considered to be model-based expectations, because, generally, a model is needed to reliably extract expectations from current prices. In this post, we explain the need for and usage of term structure models for ...
Report
Deconstructing the yield curve
We introduce a novel nonparametric bootstrap for the yield curve which is agnostic to its true factor structure. We deconstruct the yield curve into primitive objects, with weak cross-sectional and time-series dependence, that serve as building blocks for resampling the data. We analyze the properties of the bootstrap for mimicking salient features of the data and conducting valid inference. We demonstrate the benefits of our general method by revisiting the predictability of bond returns based on slow-moving fundamentals. We find that trend inflation, but not the equilibrium real rate, has ...