Affine models are very popular in modeling financial time series as they allow for analytical calculation of prices of financial derivatives like treasury bonds and options. The main property of affine models is that the conditional cumulant function, defined as the logarithmic of the...

This paper proposes a methodology for simultaneously computing a smooth estimator of the term structure of interest rates and economically justified bounds for it. It unifies existing estimation procedures that apply regression, smoothing and linear programming methods. Our methodology adjusts...

It is commonly found that the markets for long-term government bonds of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) countries were integrated prior to the EMU debt crisis. Contrasting this, we show, based on the interrelation between market integration and fractional cointegration, that there were periods...

We assess the impact of the sovereign risk spill-overs onto corporate cost of borrowing in selected euro area countries. We utilize a novel nonparametric dependence filtering frame- work to remove the effects of sovereign risk in the interest rate pass-through context. The main findings confirm...

This paper proposes an asymmetric kernel-based method for nonparametric estimation of scalar diffusion models of spot interest rates. We derive the asymptotic theory for the asymmetric kernel estimators of the drift and diffusion functions for general and positive recurrent processes and...

This paper proposes linear higher order conditions on the term structure that allow to compute valuation bounds for any deterministic cash stream. Starting from bounds on the forward rate curve and its derivatives, which are nonlinear in the discount factors, we derive linear conditions that are...

This paper presents an analysis of tax clientele eects in the German government bond market from the viewpoint of private investors. The methods developed here allow the identification of bonds that are over-valued from the viewpoint of a certain tax class, the estimation of tax-specific term...

Budget forecasts have become increasingly important as a tool of fiscal management to influence expectations of bond markets and the public at large. The inherent difficulty in projecting macroeconomic variables – together with political bias – thwart the accuracy of budget forecasts. We...

Exchange rate stability was defined as one of the prerequisites for monetary integration in Europe. In this paper, we analyze recent developments in the volatility of exchange rates of the Central European countries (the Visegrad Group) and a selected group of European Union countries (the...

This work presents a semi parametric approach to evaluate the role of the Central Bank reserve requirements, both remunerated and non-remunerated, over the bank interest rate distribution in Brazil between September/2000 and March/2004. We adopted the semi parametric approach developed by...