This study tests for a break in the persistence of EMU government bond yield spreads examining data from France, Italy and Spain and using German interest rates as a kind of benchmark. The results reported here provide evidence for breaks between 2006 and 2008. The persistence of the yield...

Since the GFC, the supply of US government bonds has grown significantly, involving large changes in the structure of Treasury debt. This has important implications because many investment funds target duration to immunize their liabilities, incentivised by shortfall risks and new legislation....

We use a dynamic multipath general-to-specific algorithm to capture structural instability in the link between euro area sovereign bond yield spreads against Germany and their underlying determinants over the period January 1999-August 2011. We offer new evidence suggesting a significant...

Taking a cue from the assertion that “loose lips sink markets” (Carmassi and Micossi, 2010), this paper investigates to what extent and why political communication has had an impact on the sovereign bond spreads of selected euro area countries over the German Bund. Drawing on 25,000 news...

Although the federal funds rate started rising from mid-2004 US long term rates continued to fall. A likely contributory factor to this conundrum was the contemporaneous increase in US bond demand. Using ARDL-based models, which accommodate structural breaks, this paper estimates the impact of...

We introduce a robust, flexible and easy-to-implement method for estimating the yield curve from Treasury securities. This method is non-parametric and optimally learns basis functions in reproducing Hilbert spaces with an economically motivated smoothness reward. We provide a closed-form...

The appearance of negative bond yields presents significant challenges for the fixed income markets, which mainly concern related forecasting models. The Nelson-Siegel-Svensson model (NSS) is one of the models that is most frequently used by central banks to estimate the term structure of...

Affine term structure models of bond yields are important tools for analyzing fixed income markets and monetary policy. Estimators of Adrian, Crump, and Mönch (2013) and Diez de Los Rios (2015) replace time-consuming nonlinear search procedures with a set of simple linear regressions. However,...

This note examines the stochastic properties of US term spreads with parametric and semi-parametric fractional integration techniques. Since the observed data (rather than the estimated residuals from a cointegrating regression) are used for the analysis, standard methods can be applied. The...

This paper analyses persistence and non-linearities in quarterly and monthly US Treasury 10-year bond yields over the period 1962-2021 using two different fractional integration approaches including Chebyshev polynomials and Fourier functions respectively. The results for both quarterly and...