Liquidity measures for bonds selection to estimate the interest rate curve: Spanish case

Abstract

The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority establishes that the estimation of the interest rate curve, used for the valuation of insurance company operations, should consider all liquid bonds; in particular, for the euro zone, if fixes bonds with maturity up to 20 years as the last liquid point. The financial literature has analyzed the different components of liquidity (rigidity, immediacy, breadth, resilience and depth) and it has found a significant relationship between the return-risk binomial and liquidity. This paper searches for the liquidity indicators correlated with bond yield and risk, in order to select the last liquid point. On a daily data sample of the Spanish public debt market we find that, up to one month, the indicators of depth