Forecasting Negative Yield-Curve Distributions

Abstract

Negative interest rates are present in various marketplaces since mid-2014, following the negative interest rate policy (NIRP) adopted by the European Central Bank in order to lift the economic growth (and, therefore, the inflation). However, this policy involves difficulties for market practitioners as there is no model that enables to forecast negative interest rates in a coherent and sounding theoretical manner. Facing this lack of reliable models, the well-known Historical Approach (HA) appears to be a good resource. By tweaking the HA, we derive a data-driven and very tractable tool that allows practitioners to generate yield-curve distribution at future discrete time horizons. So, we provide a robust and easy-to-understand forecasting model, suitable for the NIRP context, allowing to appreciate its prediction power. Besides the methodology development that we present in this work, various numerical illustrations are reported in order to shed light on the benefit (and the limit) of our forecasting approach.