Empirical studies on the pricing of bonds and interest rate derivatives

Nowadays, both large financial and non-financial institutions use models for the term structure of interest rates for risk management and pricing purposes. This thesis focuses on these two important applications of term structure models. In the first part, the empirical performance of several term structure models for the pricing and risk management of bonds is investigated. The applications in this part focus on modelling international bond returns, the pricing of bonds that are subject to default risk, and the role of transaction costs of bonds in testing term structure models. The second part of the thesis focuses on the pricing and hedging of interest rate derivatives. This part includes an analysis of the relevant number of term structure factors for the pricing and hedging of interest rate derivatives, and an empirical comparison of the recently developed market models. Finally, the benefits of combining interest rate data and derivative price data for estimating and testing term structure models are analyzed.