Volatility Forecasting in European Government Bond Markets

In this paper we examine the predictive power of the Heterogeneous Autoregressive (HAR) model on Treasury bond return volatility of major European government bond markets. The HAR-type volatility forecasting models show that short term and medium term volatility is a robust and statistically significant predictor of the term structure of intradayvolatility of bonds with maturities ranging from 1-year up to 30-years. When decomposing volatility into its continuous and discontinuous (jump) component, we find that the jump tail risk component is a significant predictor of bond market volatility. We lastly show that approximately half of the monetary policy announcement dates coincide with the presence of jumps in bond returns, and the pre-announcement drift is present in the bond market. Hence, the monetary policy announcements are important determinant of European bond market volatility.