Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-68945f75b7-77sjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-04T13:17:07.285Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

36 - Conclusions

from Part VII - What the Models Tell Us

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2018

Riccardo Rebonato
Affiliation:
Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO), California
Get access

Summary

If all we ever did was wind and unwind the tangled threads of learning without ever getting any further – then what an unhappy fate we would have!

Herder

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.

Sir Francis Bacon, Novum Organon

Computers are useless. They only give us answers.

Picasso

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

The Road Followed

By the end of a book, the writer is pretty tired, and the reader rarely feels much perkier. Therefore I will try to keep these concluding remarks short, sweet and to the point.

We have looked at affine yield curve modelling from a structural perspective. We started from a really beautiful and simple model (the Vasicek model), that we liberally employed to build our intuition about the workings of more complex affine models. We examined carefully up to which point this entry-level approach could take us in our structural understanding.

Alas, when we looked at the recent empirical information about excess returns and term premia, we concluded that, for all its elegance and beauty, we had to graft a pretty substantial extension onto the Vasicek structure. Above all, we decided that for a model to be worth its predictive salt it would have to have a non-constant market price of risk. More precisely, as a bare minimum, the market price of risk would have to be state-dependent, and would have to capture the dependence of the expected excess returns on the slope of the yield curve (and perhaps on more exotic return-predicting factors).

We therefore gathered the tools to analyze, and perhaps even build, new models that could incorporate this evidence. We clambered with greater determination than elegance over the analytical and notational difficulties of the more modern approaches, and we compared their predictions about term premia and rate expectations with what has been found empirically in the last 10-or-so years. What did we find?

Type
Chapter
Information
Bond Pricing and Yield Curve Modeling
A Structural Approach
, pp. 714 - 724
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Conclusions
  • Riccardo Rebonato
  • Book: Bond Pricing and Yield Curve Modeling
  • Online publication: 25 May 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316694169.042
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Conclusions
  • Riccardo Rebonato
  • Book: Bond Pricing and Yield Curve Modeling
  • Online publication: 25 May 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316694169.042
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusions
  • Riccardo Rebonato
  • Book: Bond Pricing and Yield Curve Modeling
  • Online publication: 25 May 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316694169.042
Available formats
×