The Quality of Public Information and The Term Structure of Interest Rates

This paper analyzes the term structure of interest rates in an exchangeonly Lucas (1978) economy where consumers learn about a stochastic growth rate through observations of the endowment process and an external public signal. We show that there is a premium for noisy external public information in long-term bonds. In contrast to Feldman (1989), where agents learn only through realized outputs, we find that nonstochastic interest rates are not necessary for the expectations hypothesis to hold.