December 23, 2006
Interest rates
-
-
December 18, 2006
A Summary of the Bank of Canada Conference on Fixed-Income Markets, 3–4 May 2006
The Bank of Canada's interest in fixed-income markets spans several of its functional areas of responsibility, including monetary policy, funds management, and financial system stability and efficiency. For that reason, the 2006 conference brought together top academics and central bankers from around the world to discuss leading-edge work in the field of fixed-income research. The papers and discussions cover such topics as the efficiency of fixed-income markets, price formation, the determinants of the yield curve, and volatility modelling. This article provides a short summary of each conference paper and the ensuing discussion. -
Modelling Term-Structure Dynamics for Risk Management: A Practitioner's Perspective
Modelling term-structure dynamics is an important component in measuring and managing the exposure of portfolios to adverse movements in interest rates. -
Can Affine Term Structure Models Help Us Predict Exchange Rates?
The author proposes an arbitrage-free model of the joint behaviour of interest and exchange rates whose exchange rate forecasts outperform those produced by a random-walk model, a vector autoregression on the forward premiums and the rate of depreciation, and the standard forward premium regression. -
An Evaluation of MLE in a Model of the Nonlinear Continuous-Time Short-Term Interest Rate
The author compares the performance of three Gaussian approximation methods - by Nowman (1997), Shoji and Ozaki (1998), and Yu and Phillips (2001) - in estimating a model of the nonlinear continuous-time short-term interest rate. -
The Canadian Macroeconomy and the Yield Curve: An Equilibrium-Based Approach
The authors develop and estimate an equilibrium-based model of the Canadian term structure of interest rates. -
Testing the Parametric Specification of the Diffusion Function in a Diffusion Process
A new consistent test is proposed for the parametric specification of the diffusion function in a diffusion process without any restrictions on the functional form of the drift function. -
Does Financial Structure Matter for the Information Content of Financial Indicators?
Of particular concern to monetary policy-makers is the considerable unreliability of financial variables for predicting GDP growth and inflation. -
An Empirical Analysis of the Canadian Term Structure of Zero-Coupon Interest Rates
Zero-coupon interest rates are the fundamental building block of fixed-income mathematics, and as such have an extensive number of applications in both finance and economics. -
November 23, 2004
Real Return Bonds: Monetary Policy Credibility and Short-Term Inflation Forecasting
The break-even inflation rate (BEIR) is calculated by comparing the yields on conventional and Real Return Bonds. Defined as the average rate of inflation that equates the expected returns on these two bonds, the BEIR has the potential to contain useful information about long-run inflation expectations. Yet the BEIR has been higher, on average, and more variable than survey measures of inflation expectations, which may be explained by the effects of premiums and distortions embedded in the BEIR. Because of the difficulty in accounting for these distortions, the BEIR should not be given a large weight as a measure of long-run inflation expectations at this time. However, as the Real Return Bond market continues to develop, the BEIR should become a more useful indicator of inflation expectations. At present, it demonstrates no clear advantage over survey measures and even past inflation rates in forecasting near-term inflation.