Forecasting Interest Rates in India

Abstract

This paper develops univariate (ARIMA and ARCH/GARCH) and multivariate models (VAR, VECM and Bayesian VAR) to forecast short- and long-term rates, viz., call money rate, 15–91 days Treasury Bill rates and interest rates on Government securities with (residual) maturities of one year, five years and 10 years. Multivariate models consider factors such as liquidity, repo rate, yield spread, inflation rate, foreign interest rates and forward premium. The paper finds that multivariate models generally outperform univariate ones over longer forecast horizons. Overall, the paper concludes that the forecasting performance of Bayesian VAR models is satisfactory for most interest rates and their superiority in performance is marked at longer forecast horizons.