The cyclical variation behavior of the mortgage spread has motivated some studies to investigate its relationship to … economic activity. Indeed, recent empirical findings indicate that the mortgage spread is a determinant/predictor of economic … activity. We define the mortgage spread as the difference between the 30-year mortgage and 10-year Treasury rates and ask …

forecasting long-term interest rates. We ask whether consumer survey data on both mortgage interest rates and expected inflation … help beat the random walk in forecasting the 30-year fixed rate mortgage. Using the vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling … framework with the mortgage rate and consumer survey data as variables, we generate the mortgage rate forecasts for 1988 …