Around and around: the expectations hypothesis

Mark Fisher and Christian Gilles

No 96-17, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: We show how to construct arbitrage-free models of the term structure of interest rates in which various expectations hypotheses can hold. McCulloch (1993) provided a Gaussian non-Markovian example of the unbiased expectations hypothesis (U--EH), thereby contradicting the assertion by Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (CIR, 1981) that only the so-called local expectations hypothesis could hold. We generalize that example in three ways: (i) We characterize the U--EH in terms of forward rates; (ii) we extend this characterization to a class of expectations hypotheses that includes all of those considered by CIR; and (iii) we construct stationary Markovian and non-Gaussian economies. The building block is a maturity-dependent vector that travels around a circle at a constant speed as maturity increases.

Keywords: Rational; expectations; (Economic; theory) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/1996/199617/199617abs.html (text/html)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/1996/199617/199617pap.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Around and Around: The Expectations Hypothesis (2019)
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:fip:fedgfe:96-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().