Essays on Interest Rate Analysis with GovPX Data

U.S. Treasury Securities are crucially important in many areas of finance. However, zero-coupon yields are not observable in the market. Even though published zero-coupon yields exist, they are sometimes not available for certain research topics or for high frequency. Recently, high frequency data analysis has become popular, andthe GovPX database is a good source of tick data for U.S. Treasury securities from which we can construct zero-coupon yield curves. Therefore, we try to t zero-coupon yield curves from low frequency and high frequency data from GovPX by three different methods: the Nelson-Siegel method, the Svensson method, and the cubic spline method. Then, we try to retest the expectations hypothesis (EH) with new zero-coupon yields that are made from GovPX data by three methods using the Campbell and Shiller regression, the Fama and Bliss regression, and the Cochrane and Piazzesi regression. Regardless of the method used (the Nelson-Siegel method, the Svensson method, or the cubic spline method), the expectations hypothesis cannot be rejected in the period from June 1991 to December 2006 for most maturities in many cases. We suggest the possible explanation for the test result of the EH. Based on the overreaction hypothesis, the degree of the overreaction of spread falls over time. Thus,our result supports that the evidence of rejection of the EH has weaken over time. Also, we introduce a new estimation method for the stochastic volatility model of the short-term interest rates. Then, we compare our method with the existing method. The results suggest that our new method works well for the stochastic volatility model of short-term interest rates.