 Forecasting economic activity from yield curve factorsEfthymios Argyropoulos and Elias Tzavalis The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, 2016, vol. 36, issue C, 293-311 Abstract: This paper provides clear-cut evidence that the slope and curvature factors of the term structure of interest rates (yield curve) contain more information about future changes in economic activity than the term spread itself, often used in the literature as a predictive regressor of economic activity. These two factors reflect different information about future economic activity, which is smoothed out by the term spread. The paper shows that the slope factor has predictive power on future economic activity over longer horizons ahead, and thus may be interpreted as reflecting future business cycle conditions. On the other hand, the curvature factor, which enters the term spread with opposite sign than the slope factor, has predictive power on shorter movements of future economic activity which may be associated with changes in the current stance of monetary policy. These results hold for a number of world developed economies. Keywords: Forecasting economic activity; Yield curve factors; Nelson–Siegel term structure models; Kalman filter (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:36:y:2016:i:c:p:293-311 DOI: 10.1016/j.najef.2016.02.003 Access Statistics for this article The North American Journal of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Hamid Beladi More articles in The North American Journal of Economics and Finance from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.