Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Practical problems arise, however, if the time series contains structural breaks (as produced by German unification for German time series, for instance),...

Parametric estimation approaches are widely by central banks as they produce smooth term structures with relatively few parameters. In the paper I implement the Nelson and Siegel (1987) model for Switzerland. The estimations use daily observations of Swiss government bonds from January 1994 to...