Anticipations, prime de risque et structure par terme des taux d'intérêt : une analyse des comportements d'experts

Using Consensus Economics? monthly surveys, we show that experts? interest rate expectations in the Eurofranc market do not verify the rational expectations hypothesis. These expectations are found to be generated by a mixed process combining the traditional adaptive, regressive and extrapolative processes augmented by macroeconomic effects (price, income, money). This mixed expectational process verifies the term structure relation of interest rates based on the portfolio choice model with a long term asset and a short term asset, where a state-space representation is introduced to account for the unobservable part of the long term asset in the portfolio. As predicted by the theoretical model, the risk premium depends on the conditional expected variance of the short term asset and on the conditional expected covariance between the latter and inflation, while the estimated value of the relative risk aversion coefficient is found to be economically acceptable. Overall, these results support that experts? expectations are consistent with the model of interest rate term structure. JEL Classification : D81, D84, E43