An infinite hidden Markov model for short-term interest rates
John Maheu and
Qiao Yang
Journal of Empirical Finance, 2016, vol. 38, issue PA, 202-220
Abstract:
The time-series dynamics of short-term interest rates are important as they are a key input into pricing models of the term structure of interest rates. In this paper we extend popular discrete time short-rate models to include Markov switching of infinite dimension. This is a Bayesian nonparametric model that allows for changes in the unknown conditional distribution over time. Applied to weekly U.S. data we find significant parameter change over time and strong evidence of non-Gaussian conditional distributions. Our new model with a hierarchical prior provides significant improvements in density forecasts as well as point forecasts. We find evidence of recurring regimes as well as structural breaks in the empirical application.
Keywords: Hierarchical Dirichlet process prior; Beam sampling; Markov switching; MCMC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C14 C22 C58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927539816300639
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
Working Paper: An Infinite Hidden Markov Model for Short-term Interest Rates (2015) 
Working Paper: An Infinite Hidden Markov Model for Short-term Interest Rates (2015) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:empfin:v:38:y:2016:i:pa:p:202-220
DOI: 10.1016/j.jempfin.2016.06.006
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Empirical Finance is currently edited by R. T. Baillie, F. C. Palm, Th. J. Vermaelen and C. C. P. Wolff
More articles in Journal of Empirical Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().