Nominal Term Structure and Term Premia. Evidence from Chile

The downward trend exhibited in Chile’s nominal term structure since 2003 has been a common pattern shared by other developed and developing economies. To understand the behavior of the nominal yield curve in Chile, we rely on an affine dynamic term structure model (DTMS) which allows to decompose the term structure into the expected short-term premium (related to the monetary policy expectation) and a term premia. We show that most of the fall of long-term interest rates as well as its dynamics are related to the term premia rather than the expected short-term interest rate. With this, we report that the term premia is driven primarily by nominal uncertainty, i.e. the uncertainty for expected inflation and the US term premia.