A Gaussian approach for continuous time models of the short-term interest rate

This paper proposes a Gaussian estimator for nonlinear continuous time models of the short-term interest rate. The approach is based on a stopping time argument that produces a normalizing transformation facilitating the use of a Gaussian likelihood. A Monte Carlo study shows that the finite-sample performance of the proposed procedure offers an improvement over the discrete approximation method proposed by Nowman (1997). An em-pirical application to US and British interest rates is given.