Time-Varion in Term Premia

Abstract

Using a large, previously unexplored international dataset of market forecasts that covers a broad range of interest rates, this paper presents a wealth of empirical evidence on the behavior of the term structure of interest rates in an international perspective. We find that our survey forecasts are of quite good quality, outperforming a relevant naive benchmark in most cases. We also find considerable international evidence in favor of rejecting the 'pure' version of the expectations hypothesis. We also find some evidence that the behavior of market participants, when making predictions about the future level of interest rates, is not entirely in line with rational behavior. There is strong evidence of time-variation in term premia. Furthermore, while this variation in term premia can be captured adequately by low-order members of the ARMA class models, there is clear evidence that conditional heteroskedasticity in the movement of term premia plays an important role in explaining the time-variation for a number of countries.

Keywords: Interest rate expectations, expectations hypothesis, rationality, survey data, term structure, time-varying term premia

JEL Classification: E43, G15, E42