The Term Structure of Government Bond Yields in an Emerging Market

Wali Ullah () and Khadija Bari ()
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Wali Ullah: Department of Economics and Finance, Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi, Pakistan.

Journal for Economic Forecasting, 2018, issue 3, 5-28

Abstract: The accurate modeling of the term structure of interest rates is of vital importance in macroeconomics and finance in general and in the context of monetary policy in particular, as its factors are important in predicting future growth and inflation. This paper investigates the extent to which the so called Nelson-Siegel model (DNS) and its extended version that accounts for time varying volatility (DNS-GARCH and DNS-EGARCH) can optimally fit the yield curve and predict its future path in the context of an emerging economy. The study expands the earlier work (Koopman, et al. 2010) by looking at more elaborate specifications for volatility modeling such as E-GARCH and also evaluates the predictive role of considering the time-varying volatility in the model in terms of out-of-sample forecasting. For the in-sample fit, all three models fit the curve remarkably well even in the emerging markets. However, the DNS-EGARCH model fits the curve slightly better than the other two models. Moreover, all three specifications of the yield curve that are based on the Nelson-Siegel functional form, outperform the benchmark AR(1) forecasts at all three specified forecast horizons. The DNS comes with more precise forecasts than the volatility based extended models for the 1-month ahead forecasts, while the other two outperform the standard DNS for 6- and 12-month horizons.

Keywords: yield curve; forecasting; emerging markets; Kalman filter; EGARCH (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C51 C53 E43 G12 G17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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