THE MONOTONICITY OF THE TERM PREMIUM - ANOTHER LOOK

This paper reexamines existing evidence regarding the monotonicity of the term premium. Using a recently developed approach for testing inequality constraints, we propose and conduct tests for whether the term premium is monotonic and reach different conclusions from those implied by individual t-statistics on term premiums (even under a Bonferroni-type adjustment). Our results generally support McCulloch's (1987) view that the liquidity preference hypothesis remains unrefuted.