Controllability of longer-term interest rates requires that the persistence of their deviations from the central bank's policy rate (i.e. the policy spreads) remains sufficiently low. This paper applies fractional integration techniques to assess the persistence of policy spreads of euro area...

The goal of this paper is to develop a test for the relative importance of the time-varying term premium and the peso-problem for rejection of the Expectation Hypothesis of the Term Structure (EHTS). Our reasoning is based on a term structure model that allows for both phenomena simultaneously....

At the beginning of 2004, the Eurosystem implemented several modifications of its operational framework and liquidity management aiming at enhancing market efficiency. The purpose of this article is to study the effects of theses changes in the spread between the Eonia and the minimum bid rate....

Using intra-day data, we assess the impact of the press release on euro area monetary data on the different segments of the euro area yield curve. For this purpose, we estimate a relation between the "news" or "surprise" in the released data for annual M3 growth and the move in the interest...

This paper presents a no-arbitrage model of the yield curve that explicitly incorporates the central-bank policy rate. After having estimated the model using daily euro-area data, I explore the behavior of risk premia at the short end of the yield curve. These risk premia are neglected by the...

We analyze an estimated stochastic general equilibrium model that replicates key macroeconomic and fi nancial stylized facts during the Great Moderation of 1983-2007. Our model predicts a sizeable and volatile nominal term premium - comparable to recent reduced-form empirical estimates - with...

In this paper we adopt a principal components analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure and employ autoregressive models (AR) to forecast principal components which, in turn, are used to forecast swap rates. Arguing in favor of structural variation, we propose data...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic exante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...

The present paper sheds further light on a well-known (alleged) violation of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure (EHT) - the frequent finding of unit roots in interest rate spreads. We show that the EHT implies (i) that the nonstationarity stems from the holding premium, which is...

Inflation expectation is acknowledged to be an important indicator for policy makers and financial investors. To capture a more accurate real-time estimate of inflation expectation on the basis of financial markets, we propose an arbitrage-free model across different countries in a...