Does the Taylor Rule outperform market forecasts of interest rates?

Abstract

This study sets out to investigate whether the Taylor Rule provides better the forecasts of the future short-term interest rates than the yield curve in the South African market. For the Taylor Rule we use OLS and use the open-market forward-looking Taylor Rule to forecast interest rates. For the yield curve, simple linear interpolation is used to derive forecast. We find that in the short term, forecasted one-month ahead interest rates closely track the actuals interest rates for both models. At longer horizons, there are larger deviations of forecasts from the actual. The RMSE analyses support the Taylor Rule as a superior forecasting model in all forecasting horizons.