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Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 35 No. 11 2011

Alternative models for hedging yield curve risk: An empirical comparison

Nicola Carcano; Hakim Dall’O

Abstract

We test alternative models of yield curve risk by hedging US Treasury bond portfolios through note/bond futures. We show that traditional implementations of models based on principal component analysis, duration vectors and key rate duration lead to high exposure to model errors and to sizable transaction costs, thus lowering the hedging quality. Also, this quality randomly varies from one model and hedging problem to the other. We show that accounting for the variance of modeling errors substantially reduces both hedging errors and transaction costs for all considered models. Additionally, it leads to much more stable weights in the hedging portfolios and – as a result – to more homogeneous hedging quality. On this basis, error-adjusted principal component analysis is found to systematically and significantly outperform alternative models.

DOI
10.1016/j.jbankfin.2011.04.002
Volume
35
Issue
11
Pages
2991-3000
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib

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