Rethinking cointegration and the expectation hypothesis of the term structure

Jing Li and George Davis

Journal of Empirical Finance, 2017, vol. 44, issue C, 177-189

Abstract: Empirical investigations of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure often test the stationarity on the yield spread. We show that as the term difference increases this stationarity breaks down even under the most favorable assumption with regard to the risk premium. As a result, these cointegration tests are inappropriate. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations and provide empirical evidences that the frequency with which the data fail to reject no cointegration increases as the term difference increases. This finding remains robust after we account for a proxy for risk premium, asymmetries, and employ a new augmented error correction model that allows for time-varying error correction terms.

Keywords: Cointegration; Term structure; Expectation hypothesis; Error correction model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927539817300889
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:44:y:2017:i:c:p:177-189

DOI: 10.1016/j.jempfin.2017.09.011

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 ().