Interest rate co-movements, global factors and the long end of the term spread

Domestic vs. International correlations of interest rate maturities

The association between long and short interest rates is traditionally envisaged from a purely domestic perspective, where it is believed an empirical regularity. Hence, the weakening of this relationship in the first half of the 2000s has represented a conundrum, calling for a reassessment of the term structure and the conduct of monetary policy. Some commentators have called for investigations into the international dimension of this puzzle. Hence, in this paper we employ recent advances in panel data econometrics to investigate the co-movement of interest rate maturities both at the domestic and international levels for a sample of industrial countries. Specifically, we use the Ng (2006)…