The Term Structure of Interest Rates across Frequencies

By Katrin Assenmacher, Stefan Gerlach. Social Science Research Network, 2008

51 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper tests the expectations hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of interest rates in US data, using spectral regression techniques that allow us to consider different frequency bands. We find a positive relation between the term spread and the change in the long-term interest rate in a frequency band of 6 months to 4 years, whereas the relation is negative at higher and lower frequencies. We confirm that the variance of term premia relative to expected changes in long-term interest rates dominates at high and low frequencies, leading the EH to be rejected in those bands but not in the intermediate frequency band. JEL Classification: C22, E43

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72ac6456b10871d05d6875b8a37711110d8484fd