Search results

Analyses the empirical relation between the one‐month interest rate, the long‐term interest rate and the motgage rate in The Netherlands. To study the dynamic interactions between these variables, vector autoregressive techniques are used. Concentrates on the question of whether the mortgage rate dynamics can correctly be described by a one‐factor interest rate model. One‐factor interest rate models allow mathematical derivations of deterministic equations to price interest rate derivatives. Finds, however, that a single factor does not correctly describe the interest rate term structure. Hence, to model the mortgage rate dynamics accurately more factors should be included.

Current US tax laws provide investors an incentive to time the sales of their bonds to minimize tax liability. This gives rise to a tax-timing option that affects bond value. In reality, corporate bond investors’ tax-timing strategy is complicated by risk of default. Existing term structure models have ignored the effect of the tax-timing option, and how much corporate bond value is due to the tax-timing option is unknown. In this chapter, we assess the effects of taxes and stochastic interest rates on the timing option value and equilibrium price of corporate bonds by considering discount and premium amortization, multiple trading dates, transaction costs, and changes in the level and volatility of interest rates. We find that the value of the tax-timing option accounts for a substantial proportion of corporate bond price even when interest rate volatility is low. Ignoring the timing option value results in overestimation of credit spread, and underestimation of default probability and the marginal investor’s income tax rate. These estimation biases generally increase with bond maturity and credit risk.

After loan interest rate upper limit deregulation in October 2004, the financing environment in China changed dramatically, and the banks were eligible for risk compensation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the influence of the loan interest rate liberalization on firms’ loan maturity structure.

Based on Rajan's (1992) model, the authors constructed a trade-off model of how the banks choose long-term and short-term loans scales, and further analyzed banks’ loan term decisions under the loan interest rate upper limit deregulation or collateral cases. Then the authors used an unbalanced panel data set of 586 Chinese listed manufacturing companies and 9,376 observations during the period 1996-2011 to testify the theoretical conclusion. Furthermore, the authors studied the effect on firms with different characteristics of ownership or scale.

The results show that the loan interest rate liberalization significantly decreases the private companies’ reliance on short-term loans and increases sensitivity to interest rates of state-owned companies’ long-term loans. But the results also show that the companies’ ownership still plays a key role on the long-term loans availability. When monetary policy tightened, small companies still have to borrow short-term loans for long-term purposes. As the bank industry is still dominated by state-owned banks and the deposit interest rate has upper limits, the effect of the loan interest rate liberalization on easing long-term credit constraints is limited.

From a new perspective, the content and findings of this paper contribute to the study of the effect of the interest rate liberalization on China economy.

This study employs a multivariate GARCH model to investigate the relative sensitivities of the first and the second moment of bank stock return distribution to the short‐term and long‐term interest rates and their respective volatilities. Three portfolios are formed representing the money center banks, large banks, and small banks, respectively. Estimation and testing of hypotheses are carried out for each of the three portfolios separately. The sample includes daily data over the 1988‐2000 period. Several hypotheses are tested within the multivariate GARCH specification. These include the hypotheses of: (i) insensitivity of bank stock return to the changes in the short‐term and long‐term interest rates, (ii) insensitivity of bank stock returns to the changes in the volatilities of short‐term and long‐term interest rates, and (iii) insensitivity of bank stock return volatility to the changes in the short‐term and long‐term interest rate volatilities. The findings indicate that short‐term and long‐term interest rates and their volatilities do exert significant and differential impacts on the return generation process of the three bank portfolios. The magnitudes and the direction of the effect are model‐specific namely that they depend on whether the short‐term or the long‐term interest rate level is included in the mean return equation. These findings have implications on bank hedging strategies against the interest rate risk, regulatory decisions concerning risk‐based capital requirement, and investor’s choice of a portfolio mix.

The role of money and monetary policy of the central bank in pursuing macroeconomic stability has significantly changed over the period since the end of World War II. Globalization, liberalization, integration, and transition processes generally shaped the crucial milestones of the macroeconomic development and substantial features of economic policy and its framework in Europe. Policy-driven changes together with variety of exogenous shocks significantly affected the key features of macroeconomic environment on the European continent that fashioned the framework and design of monetary policies.

This chapter examines the key basis of the central bank’s monetary policy on its way to pursue and preserve the internal and external stability of the purchasing power of money. Substantial elements of the monetary policy like objectives and strategies are not only generally introduced but also critically discussed according to their accuracy, suitability, and reliability in the changing macroeconomic conditions. Brief overview of the Eurozone common monetary policy milestones and the past Eastern bloc countries’ experience with a variety of exchange rate regimes provides interesting empirical evidence on origins and implications of vital changes in the monetary policy conduction in Europe and the Eurozone.

Today's maturity pattern of interest rates contains an implicit market forecast of future short‐term rates. However, it is well known that these implied rates generally fail to explain actual movements in short‐term rates. From two empirical propositions about movements of yield curves it follows that half of the time short‐term rates will move in the opposite direction from that forecasted implicitly by the market. Data comparing implied forward short‐term yields on US Treasury bills with actual yield movements fail to reject the hypothesis that the market's forecast will err in di‐rection half of the time. It follows that the direction of movement in short‐term rates is independent of the shape of the yield curve. Because implied forward rates lack forecasting content it would not be rational for investors to use them as market forecasts.

This paper aims to analyze Islamic rates of return, conventional interest rates in the Malaysian deposit markets, and Kuala Lumpur Interbank Offered Rate (KLIBOR) rates in the short-term money market from the view point of co-movement and transmission.

The non-stationary time series models such as cointegration and Granger causality tests are applied to analyze the daily data.

Islamic rates of return and conventional interest rates co-move in the Malaysian deposit market. The Islamic rates of return propel conventional interest rates in the three-, six-, and 12-month maturities. Islamic rates of return and conventional interest rates form a short-term money market with KLIBOR rates.

The author analyzes econometrically the sample period from May 16, 2005 to January 12, 2012. This paper concentrates on the period after the development of Islamic banking in Malaysia.

Islamic and conventional deposit markets are competitive in Malaysia; in particular, the competition in the one-month deposit market is very keen. Islamic rates of return have more impact on the formation of short-term interest rates than conventional interest rates.

This paper makes three contributions to the related literatures. First, it uses daily data in the maturities of one month, three months, six months and 12 months for its analyses. Second, it uses the Granger causality method of Toda and Yamamoto to avoid the issue of the non-stationarity of the data. The results of the Granger causality tests in this paper are different from related literatures. Third, this paper focuses on the relationship of KLIBOR rates and Islamic rates of return, and of KLIBOR rates and conventional interest rates.

This study attempts to determine whether the level and volatility of interest rates affect the equity returns of commercial banks. Short‐term, intermediate‐term, and long‐term interest rates are used. Volatility is defined as the conditional variance of respective interest rates and is generated by using the ARCH estimation procedure. Two sets of models are estimated. The basic models attempt to determine the effect of contemporaneous and lagged interest rate volatility on bank equity returns, while the extended models incorporate additional contemporaneous macroeconomic variables. Contemporaneous interest rate volatility has little explanatory power, while lagged volatilities do possess some explanatory power, with the lag length varying depending on the interest rate series used and the time period examined. The results from the extended model suggest that the long‐term interest rate affects bank equity returns more adversely than the short‐term or the intermediate‐term interest rates. The findings establish the relevance of incorporating macroeconomic variables and their volatilities in models determining bank equity returns.

The purpose of this paper is to document stylized features and market behaviour of the Canadian Bankers' Acceptance Futures (BAX) contract; and outlook for the BAX contract as the dominant instrument to manage Canadian short‐term interest rate exposure.

The paper adopts GARCH methodology to model the time‐varying nature of the volatility of prices in the context of hedging and presents a time‐varying estimation of the hedge ratios between the BAX contract and major Canadian money market instruments.

The key finding is that the growth of the BAX Market hinges on the further development of the Canadian money market and its appeal to the international investor.

The paper demonstrates the suitability of the BAX contract as a tool in managing Canadian short‐term interest rate exposure for both domestic and international investors.

I will investigate the short-term and the long-term characteristics of Japanese daily overnight call rate between 1985 and 1999 and compare it with the U.S. federal funds rate during the same period. Such long-term data for the former has not been utilized in the previous studies. When we compare the short-term characteristics of these two rates with the corresponding long-term ones, those are found to be different. When we compare these two rates in the short-term as well as in the long-term, the long-term characteristics are found to be different, even though the short-term characteristics are similar in some sub-sample periods.