The Expectations Theory of the Term Structure of Interest Rates and Monetary Policy

The disparate evidence obtained by the empirical literature of the expectations theory of the term structure of interest rates has been interpreted in different ways. One explanation stems from the findings of Mankiw and Miron (1986) who observed that the term spread in the U.S. had substantial predictive power in line with the expectations theory before the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1914. Afterwards, the Fed's commitment to stabilising interest rates caused changes in short rates to become unpredictable on the basis of the spread. Consequently, these authors argue that monetary policy regime, and the extent to which it involves smoothing interest rates, determines the performance of the expectations theory.The argument of Mankiw and Miron has been extended and formalised by McCallum (1994), who develops a model of the interaction between the expectations theory, a time-varying autoregressive term premium, and an interest rate smoothing monetary policy combined with the use of the spread as an indicator. Kugler (1994) and Boero and Torricelli (1998) derive an exact solution to the McCallum model. Nevertheless, both of them limit their theoretical contribution to the case of one-period short rate. These two articles, together with Hsu and Kugler (1997), constitute the empirical applications of the model. All three conclude that the model is able to explain the results from standard tests of the expectations theory. The present research is intended to complete the existing theoretical and empirical literature about the McCallum model. Thus, we derive a generalisation of the exact solution of the model for any pair of maturities and, on the basis of the derived solution, we test the McCallum model for a wider range of maturities (all the above cited studies only use 1-month and 3-month interest rates) and for the Spanish term structure, to which the model has not yet been applied