The slope of the yield curve has long been found to be a useful predictor of future economic activity, but the relationship is unstable. One change we have identified in this paper is that, starting from the 1990s, movements at the long end of the yield curve have an increase in predictive...

In a simple macro-finance term structure (MFTS) model with macroeconomic variables as risk factors, it matters little whether an econometrician has a strong prior on a particular macroeconomic model. I show in a Monte Carlo experiment that econometricians with drastically different priors will...