Despite powerful advances in yield curve modeling in the last twenty years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the key practical problem of forecasting the yield curve. In this paper we do so. We use neither the no-arbitrage approach, which focuses on accurately fitting the cross...

The popular Nelson-Siegel (1987) yield curve is routinely fit to cross sections of intra-country bond yields, and Diebold and Li (2006) have recently proposed a dynamized version. In this paper we extend Diebold-Li to a global context, modeling a potentially large set of country yield curves in...

Credit risk models should reflect the observation that the relevant value of collateral is generally not the average value of the asset over all possible states of nature. In most cases, the relevant value of collateral for the lender is its secondary market value in bad states of nature, where...

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 chapter reviews some of the academic literature that links nominal and real term structures with the macroeconomy. The main conclusion is that none of our models is consistent with basic properties of nominal yields. It is difficult to explain the average shape of the nominal yield curve,...