Modeling short-term interest rates as following regime-switching processes has become increasingly popular. Theoretically, regime-switching models are able to capture rational expectations of infrequently occurring discrete events. Technically, they allow for potential time-varying stationarity....

This paper investigates why the slope of the yield curve predicts future economic activity in Germany and the United States. A structural VAR is used to identify aggregate supply, aggregate demand, monetary policy and inflation scare shocks and to analyze their effects on the real, nominal and...

This study uses Markov-switching models to evaluate the informational content of the term structure as a predictor of recessions in eight OECD countries. The empirical results suggest that for all countries the term spread is sensibly modelled as a two-state regime-switching process. Moreover,...

The market model of interest rates specifies simple forward or Libor rates as lognormally distributed, their stochastic dynamics has a linear volatility function. In this paper, the model is extended to quadratic volatility functions which are the product of a quadratic polynomial and a...

McCallum (1994a) proposes a monetary rule where policymakers have some tendency to resist rapid changes in exchange rates to explain the forward premium puzzle. We estimate this monetary policy reaction function within the framework of an affine term structure model to find that, contrary to...

This paper studies a nonlinear one-factor term structure model in discrete time. The single factor is the short-term interest rate, which is modeled as a self-exciting threshold autoregressive (SETAR) process. Our specification allows for shifts in the intercept and the variance. The process is...

It is well documented in the literature that individual saving decisions vary with the life cycle and at the macroeconomic level, a changing demographic age structure affects aggregated savings, which then drives a slow movement of interest rates. In this paper, we propose a semiparametric...

This paper assesses redenomination risk in the euro area. We first estimate daily default-risk-free yield curves for French, German, and Italian bonds that can be redenominated and for bonds that cannot. Then, we extract the compensation for redenomination risk from the yield spreads between...