Since arbitrage-free is a desirable theoretical feature in a healthy financial market, many efforts have been made to construct arbitrage-free models for yield curves. However, little attention is paid to review if such restriction will improve yield forecast. We evaluate the importance of arbitrage-free restriction on dynamic Nelson-Siegel term structure when forecasting yield curves. We find that it doesn’t help. We also compare these two Nelson-Siegel dynamic models with a benchmark dynamic model and show that Nelson-Siegel structure improve forecasts for long-maturity yields. / text

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Economists often use complex mathematical models to forecast the future path of the economy and the likelihood of recession. But more simple indicators such as interest rates, stock price indices, and monetary aggregates also contain some relevant information about future economic activity. In this thesis we revisit the usefulness of one such indicator, the yield curve or, more specifically, the spread between the interest rates on the ten-year Treasury note and the three-month Treasury bill. By using four different models we examine whether the yield spread has still some predicitve power for future real GDP growth in selected european countries. What is more, we are comparing the predictive power of the yield spread with different variables, both in- sample and out-of-sample. We decompose the yield spread into expectations effect and term premium effect in order to investigate which factor contributes more to predicting real GDP growth. Using modified definition of recession we conclude that that yield spread still contains some useful information for predicting future economic activity, although its predictive power deteriorates.

In this thesis we survey several interpolation methods that are used to construct the yield curves. We also review the bootstrapping and show that the bootstrap is closely connected to the interpolation in the case of bootstrapping yield curve. The most effort is dedicated, in this thesis, on the monotone convex method and on investigation of the difficulties to get accurate yield curves.

The yields of xenon and krypton from the neutron- induced fission of Am241 and Am242 have been measured with a mass spectrometer. This was accomplished by irradiating samples of Am241 for different lengths of time so that the effect of the growth of highly fissionable Am242 could be determined. These studies reveal that both the degree of fine structure in the mass yield curve and the fission-product charge distribution are dependent on the energy of the incident neutrons. This has not been previously observed for any fissioning nuclide. These studies also reveal effects of the 50-neutron shell and of the neutron-proton ratio of the fissioning nuclide on the mass yield curve. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The scope of this study is to estimate the zero-coupon yield curve of tomorrow by using Vasicek yield curve model with the zero-coupon bond yield data of today. The raw data of this study is the yearly simple spot rates of the Turkish zero-coupon bonds with different maturities of each day from July 1, 1999 to March 17, 2004. We completed the missing data by using Nelson-Siegel yield curve model and we estimated tomorrow yield cuve with the discretized Vasicek yield curve model.

Exchange rate forecasting is hard issue for most of floating exchange rate economies. Studying exchange rate is very attractive matter since almost no model could beat random walk in short run yet. Relative yields and information in relative yield curves are contemporary topics in empirical literature and this study follows Chen and Tsang (2009) who model exchange rate changes with relative factors obtained from Nelson-Siegel (1987) yield curve model and find that relative factor model can forecast exchange rate change up to 2 years and perform better than random walk in short run. Analysis follows the methodology defined by Chen and Tsang (2009) and TL/USD, TL/EUR exchange rate changes are modeled by the relative factors namely relative level, relative slope and relative curvature. Basically, 162 weekly datasets from 09.01.2007 to 16.03.2010 are used and the relative factors for each week are estimated. Afterwards, regression analysis is made and results show that relative level and relative curvature factors are significant up to 4-6 weeks horizon but relative slope does not provide any valuable information for exchange rate prediction in Turkish financial market. Length of forecasting horizon of relative factor model is too short when compared to other exchange rate models. Since it is accepted that exchange rates follow random walk, we provided some tests to compare performance of the model. Similar to the literature, only short run performance of relative factor model is compared to random walk model and concluded that the relative factor model does not provide better forecasting performance in Turkish financial market

This thesis focus on a yield curve modelling. It estimates unobserved "global" yield curve factors which drives changes in individual real yield curves. Yield curves of USD, GBP, JPY and EUR are considered and global factors are able to explain substantial part of their variances. The method is built on the Nelson-Siegel model which is implemented in a state-space form to be able to extract the unobserved yield factors. The estimated global yield factors are further used for explaining the evolution of the Czech yield curve. Their impact to the Czech yield curve is estimated in a time-varying regression which results show that the impact of the global factors is stronger during the years of the interventions of the Czech National Bank and thus suggests that the interventions help to transmit the global low interest rates to the Czech economy.

The impact of rare disasters on equity premium and term premium in a New Keynesian DSGE model is explored in the thesis. Andreasen's (2012) model with Epstein-Zin preferences, bonds and a rare disaster shock in total factor productivity process is extended by a variable capital stock and an equity-type asset. We find that the variable capital significantly changes behavior of the model, capital depreciation must be substantially increased to counter the effect of variable capital and stochastic mean of inflation increases. The model calibrated to the US economy and a high risk aversion generates 10-year term premium of 90 basis points, rare disasters increase the premium only by 3 basis points. The equity premium is 163 basis points and rare disasters increase it also only by 3 basis points. The model with a low coefficient of relative risk aversion of 5.5 generates negative risk premia. Rare disasters increase the risk premia by mere 4 basis points in comparison to a model with i.i.d. shocks. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This doctoral thesis devotes itself to macro-finance models of the Czech yield curve that enable the modeling of the yield curve as a whole and belong to the group of multi-factors models. These factors are unobservable or latent variables, and are intuitively called level, slope and curvature. Macro-finance models not only fit the yield curve through the use of latent factors, but they also try to provide a macroeconomic interpretation. The macro part of the model uses a type of VAR model, where the macroeconomic variables are endogenous or exogenous, or some macroeconomic model based on e.g. a New Keynesian economy. Such a type of models can answer (1) how the macroeconomic variables affect the yield curve, and, on the other hand, (2) how these macroeconomic variables are affected by the yield curve. The EUR/CZK exchange rate and the external environment play an important role in the Czech small open economy (in particular, developments in the eurozone and the impact of global investors' sentiment toward risky assets). Thus, we should take this into consideration when applying to Czech data. It has been shown that temporary macroeconomic and financial shocks (to inflation, output gap, EUR/CZK exchange rate, external demand, etc.) strongly affect the short end of the yield curve; however, longer spot rates react only marginally. The longer end of the curve may move more significantly in the case of a longer duration of the above-mentioned shocks (thus affecting inflationary expectations) or in the case of shocks to the inflation target and real equilibrium interest rates.