Der seit der Finanzkrise steile Anstieg der Zinsdifferenzen zwischen europäischen Staatsanleihen bringt mehrere Mitgliedsländer der europäischen Währungsunion (EWU) unter erhebliche Refinanzierungsschwierigkeiten und wirft die Frage nach den Ursachen auf. Dieser Bericht fasst die Ergebnisse...

We test whether the Nelson and Siegel (1987) yield curve model is arbitrage-free in a statistical sense. Theoretically, the Nelson-Siegel model does not ensure the absence of arbitrage opportunities, as shown by Bjork and Christensen (1999). Still, central banks and public wealth managers rely...

In this paper we compare the in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecasting performance of no-arbitrage quadratic and essentially affine term structure models, as well as the dynamic Nelson-Siegel model. In total eleven model variants are evaluated, comprising five quadratic, four affine and two...

The illiquidity of long-maturity options has made it difficult to study the term structures of option spanning portfolios. This paper proposes a new estimation and inference framework for these option-implied term structures that addresses long-maturity illiquidity. By building a sieve estimator...

We present a new nonparametric method for fitting the term structure of interest rates from bond prices. Our method is a variant of the smoothing spline approach, but within our framework we are able to determine the smoothing coefficient automatically from the data using generalized...

We study the determinants of sovereign bond yield spreads across 10 EMU countries between Q1/1999 and Q1/2010. We apply a semiparametric time-varying coefficient model to identify, to what extent an observed change in the yield spread is due to a shift in macroeconomic fundamentals or due to...

In this paper we compare the in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecasting performance of no-arbitrage quadratic and essentially affine term structure models, as well as the dynamic Nelson-Siegel model. In total eleven model variants are evaluated, comprising five quadratic, four affine and two...

This present paper provides both theoretical and empirical analyses of multi-factor joint affine term structure models (JATSMs) in explaining the co-movements of international term structure slopes. We extend the single-country affine term structure models of Dai and Singleton (2000) to a...

In this paper we develop a joint non-parametric approach to the problem of the decomposition of bond yields and CDS spreads. The proposed approach is essentially an infinite-dimensional modification of the Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework and is general enough to capture even very non-trivial...

We propose a highly optimized latent factor representation of the yield curve obtained by training a variational autoencoder (VAE) to curve data from multiple currencies. A curious byproduct of such training is a "world map of latent space" where neighbors have similar curve shapes, and distant...