A large part of the term structure literature interprets the first underlying factors as a level factor, a slope factor, and a curvature factor. In this paper we consider factor models interpretable as a level factor model, a level and a slope factor model, respectively. We prove that such...

In this paper, we present a general discrete-time affine framework aimed at jointly modeling yield curves associated with different debtors. The underlying fixed-income securities may differ in terms of credit quality and/or in terms of liquidity. The risk factors follow conditionally Gaussian...

This article proposes an overview of the usefulness of the regime switching approach for building various kinds of bond pricing models and of the roles played by the regimes in these models. Both default-free and defaultable bonds are considered. The regimes can be used to capture stochastic...

In order to analyse the interest rate transmission mechanism, we study daily Euro-rates term structure for the US, Germany, and the UK between 1983 and 1997. We estimate multivariate VECM-GARCH models, which take into account moste of the usual features of financial data (non-stationarity,...

This paper introduces a novel kind of interest-rate model offering simple analytical pricing formulas for swaps, futures, swaptions, caps and floors. The model is based on an original use of regime-switching features that makes it consistent with the non-linear behavior of interest rates. In...

In June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) announced the implementation of new refinancing operations aimed at supporting bank lending to the non-financial private sector. This paper exhibits and prices options embedded in these Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations. In particular, it...

In this paper we argue that banks anticipate short-term market rates when setting interest rates on loans and deposits. In order to include anticipated rates in an empirical model, we use two methods to forecast market rates - a level, slope, curvature model and a principal components model -...

In this paper, we estimate the determinants of the spreads between the 10-year sovereign bond yields and the (interest rate) swap rate for a sample of 22 OECD countries over the January 1999-December 2013 period, using various models. Our main, fixed-effect, model highlights the crucial role of...

The Gram-Charlier expansion, where skewness and kurtosi directly appear as parameters, has become popular in Finance as a generalization of the normal density. We show how positivity constraints can be numerically implemented, thereby guaranteeing that the expansion defines a density. The...

Gram-Charlier expansion have become popular in Finance as a generalization over the normality assumption. Even though Gram-Charlier expansions allow for a certain flexibility over skewness and kurtosis they have the unfortunate drawback of sometimes yielding negative densities. The goal of this...