IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/anderf/qt5hs021jf.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Regime Shifts in Short Term Riskless Interest Rates

Author

Listed:
  • Ball, Clifford A.
  • Torous, Walter N.

Abstract

Chan, Karolyi, Longstaff, and Sanders [1992] find no evidence that the October 1979 change in Federal Reserve operating policy resulted in a once-and-for-all deterministic break in the behavior of short term riskless interest rates. In contrast, we provide evidence of such a regime shift even after allowing the volatility of interest rate changes to depend on the level of interest rates. However, rather than modeling this regime-shift as a permanent event with no further shifts possible, it is more realistic to model the change in regimes itself as a random variable. Accordingly, we put forward a stochastic volatility interest rate model which generalizes previous specifications of interest rate dynamics and allowed testing for stochastic regime shifts. This Markov regime shifting model provides a more accurate description of the behavior of U.S. short term riskless interest rates. We also consider a specification that allows interest rate volatility to follow a diffusion proves and we provide a statistically efficient integration-based filtering procedure to estimate its parameters. Five U.S. short term riskless interest rate data, we cannot statistically distinguish between these alternative models. In either case, once the stochastic nature of interest rate volatility is taken in account, we find little or no evidence of a deterministic structural break in corresponding stochastic volatility interest rate dynamics around October 1979.

Suggested Citation

  • Ball, Clifford A. & Torous, Walter N., 1995. "Regime Shifts in Short Term Riskless Interest Rates," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt5hs021jf, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
  • Handle: RePEc:cdl:anderf:qt5hs021jf
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5hs021jf.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sebastian Edwards & Raul Susmel, 2000. "Interest Rate Volatility and Contagion in Emerging Markets: Evidence from the 1990s," NBER Working Papers 7813, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Goto, Shingo, 2000. "The Fed's Effect on Excess Returns and Inflation is Much Bigger Than You Think," University of California at Los Angeles, Anderson Graduate School of Management qt04f1z5hb, Anderson Graduate School of Management, UCLA.
    3. J L Breeden & D Ingram, 2010. "Monte Carlo scenario generation for retail loan portfolios," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 61(3), pages 399-410, March.
    4. Andersen, Torben G. & Lund, Jesper, 1997. "Estimating continuous-time stochastic volatility models of the short-term interest rate," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 77(2), pages 343-377, April.
    5. Jacob Boudoukh & Matthew Richardson & Richard Stanton & Robert F. Whitelaw, 1999. "A Multifactor, Nonlinear, Continuous-Time Model of Interest Rate Volatility," NBER Working Papers 7213, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Edwards, Sebastian & Susmel, Raul, 2001. "Volatility dependence and contagion in emerging equity markets," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 505-532, December.
    7. Sebastian Edwards, 2000. "Interest Rates, Contagion and Capital Controls," NBER Working Papers 7801, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Jacob Boudoukh & Matthew Richardson & Richard Stanton & Robert Whitelaw, 1999. "A Multifactor, Nonlinear, Continuous-Time Model of Interest Rate Volatility," New York University, Leonard N. Stern School Finance Department Working Paper Seires 99-042, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business-.
    9. Dell'Aquila, Rosario & Ronchetti, Elvezio & Trojani, Fabio, 2003. "Robust GMM analysis of models for the short rate process," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 10(3), pages 373-397, May.
    10. Gómez-Valle, Lourdes & Marti­nez-Rodri­guez, Julia, 2008. "Modelling the term structure of interest rates: An efficient nonparametric approach," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(4), pages 614-623, April.
    11. Lourdes Gómez-Valle & Julia Martínez-Rodríguez, 2010. "Improving the term structure of interest rates: two-factor models," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 15(3), pages 275-287.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:anderf:qt5hs021jf. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aguclus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.