A critical review of techniques for Term Structure analysis

We give a comprehensive review of credit term structure modeling methodologies. The conventional approach to modeling credit term structure is summarized and shown to be equivalent to a particular type of the reduced form credit risk model, the fractional recovery of market value approach. We argue that the corporate practice and market observations do not support this approach. The more appropriate assumption is the fractional recovery of par, which explicitly violates the s...

We present a family of models for the term structure of interest rates which describe the interest rate curve as a stochastic process in a Hilbert space. We start by decomposing the deformations of the term structure into the variations of the short rate, the long rate and the fluctuations of the curve around its average shape. This fluctuation is then described as a solution of a stochastic evolution equation in an infinite dimensional space. In the case where deformations a...

The crisis that affected financial markets in the last years leaded market practitioners to revise well known basic concepts like the ones of discount factors and forward rates. A single yield curve is not sufficient any longer to describe the market of interest rate products. On the other hand, using different yield curves at the same time requires a reformulation of most of the basic assumptions made in interest rate models. In this paper we discuss market evidences that le...

Affine term structure models have gained significant attention in the finance literature, mainly due to their analytical tractability and statistical flexibility. The aim of this article is to present both theoretical foundations as well as empirical aspects of the affine model class. Starting from the original one-factor short-rate models of Vasi\v{c}ek and Cox \emph{et al,} we provide an overview of the properties of regular affine processes and explain their relationship t...

In this three-part series of papers, we argue that the conventional spread measures are not well defined for credit-risky bonds and introduce a set of credit term structures which correct for the biases associated with the strippable cash flow valuation assumption. We demonstrate that the resulting estimates are significantly more robust and remain meaningful even when applied to deeply distressed bonds. We also suggest a new definition of credit bond duration and convexity w...

This article investigates parameter estimation of affine term structure models by means of the generalized method of moments. Exact moments of the affine latent process as well as of the yields are obtained by using results derived for p-polynomial processes. Then the generalized method of moments, combined with Quasi-Bayesian methods, is used to get reliable parameter estimates and to perform inference. After a simulation study, the estimation procedure is applied to empiric...

The classical approach in finance attempts to model the term structure of interest rates using specified stochastic processes and the no arbitrage argument. Up to now, no universally accepted theory has been obtained for the description of experimental data. We have chosen a more phenomenological approach. It is based on results obtained some twenty years ago by physicists, results which show that Pad\'e Approximants are very suitable for approximating large classes of functi...

The technique of Pad\'e Approximants, introduced in a previous work, is applied to extended recent data on the distribution of variations of interest rates compiled by the Federal Reserve System in the US. It is shown that new power laws and new scaling laws emerge for any maturity not only as a function of the Lag but also as a function of the average inital rate. This is especially true for the one year maturity where critical forms and critical exponents are obtained. This...

The Convolution and Master equations governing the time behavior of the term structure of Interest Rates are set up both for continuous variables and for their discretised forms. The notion of Seed is introduced. The discretised theoretical distributions matching the empirical data from the Federal Reserve System (FRS) are deduced from a discretised seed which enjoys remarkable scaling laws. In particular the tails of the distributions are very well reproduced. These results ...

In this paper, we analyze the diversity of term structure functions (e.g., yield curves, swap curves, credit curves) constructed in a process which complies with some admissible properties: arbitrage-freeness, ability to fit market quotes and a certain degree of smooth- ness. When present values of building instruments are expressed as linear combinations of some primary quantities such as zero-coupon bonds, discount factor, or survival probabilit- ies, arbitrage-free bounds ...