Time-Varying Risk Aversion and Forecastability of the US Term Structure of Interest Rates

In this paper, we analyse the forecasting ability of a time-varying metric of daily risk aversion for the entire term structure of interest rates of Treasury securities of the United States (US) as reflected by the three latent factors, level, slope and curvature. Using daily data covering the out-of-sample period 22nd June, 1988 to 3rd September, 2020 (given the in-sample period 30th May, 1986 to 21st June, 1988) within a quantiles-based framework, the results show statistically significant forecasting gains emanating from risk aversion for the tails of the conditional distributions of the level, slope and curvature factors at horizons of one-day, one-week, and one-month-ahead. Interestingly, a conditional mean-based model fails to detect any evidence of out-of-sample predictability. Our findings have important implications for academics, bond investors, and policymakers in their quest to better understand the evolution of future movement in US Treasury securities.