We show that the recently developed nonparametric procedure for fitting the term structure of interest rates developed by Linton, Mammen, Nielson and Tanggaard (2000) overall performs notably better than the highly flexible McCulloch (1975) cubic spline and Fama and Bliss (1987) bootstrap...

In semiparametric models it is a common approach to under-smooth the nonparametric functions in order that estimators of the finite dimensional parameters can achieve root-n consistency. The requirement of under-smoothing may result as we show from inefficient estimation methods or technical...