We investigate how conventional and unconventional monetary policies affect the dynamics of the yield curve by assessing the performance of individual yield curve models and their mixtures. Out-of-sample forecasts for U.S. bond yields show that the arbitrage-free Nelson-Siegel model and its...

In this paper we propose a novel approach to estimating and testing skewness in a stochastic volatility (SV) model. Our key idea is to replace a normal return error in the standard SV model with a split normal error. We show that this simple variation in the model brings about two large...