We use a no-arbitrage essentially affine three-factor model to estimate term premia in US and German ten-year government bond yields. In line with the existing literature, we find that estimated premia have followed a downward trend since the 1980s: from 4.9 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in...

This paper analyses changes in short-term interest rate expectations and uncertainty during ECB Governing Council days. For this purpose, it extends the estimation of risk-neutral probability density functions up to tick frequency. In particular, the non-parametric estimator of these densities,...

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 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...

This paper constructs unbiased and model-free measures of daily and hourly volatility of the overnight interest rate negotiated on the Italian interbank deposits market (e-MID) using high-frequency transaction data. We find that the largest increases in volatility and the most notable variations...

The global financial crisis rapidly spread across borders and financial markets, and also distressed EU bond markets. The crisis did not hit all markets in the same way. We measure the strength and direction of linkages between 16 EU sovereign bond markets using a factor-augmented version of the...

We propose a multi-currency quadratic term structure model that allows for several sources of market incompleteness. A new feature of the model is the jump-quadratic dynamics of the exchange rates that simultaneously generate greater flexibility in the time-varying risk premium and excessive...

This paper is concerned with the empirical investigation of models of the US short term interest rate, using a mixture of classical non-parametric methods and of Bayesian parametric methods. The shape of the drift and volatility functions of the usual di usion equation are rst investigated using...

Economic forecasts taken into account during the European Semester are getting an increasing role in macroeconomic policy decisions. The main motivation for this paper is to analyse the performance of national, international and private agencies in forecasting the government deficit as a ratio...

This text evaluates the empirical models of the Term Structure of Interest Rates (TSIR), comparing the resulting estimates regarding goodness-of-fit, robustness to outliers, and smoothness. In addition to the descriptive statistics on these metrics, the Friedman test and the multiple comparison...