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This paper examines estimates of the term premium on federal funds futures rates, with a focus on near-dated contracts and therefore the more immediate policy horizon. The first set of methods assumes that the term premium is constant over time. Under this framework, calculations that use survey data to proxy for forecast errors produce more intuitive results than estimates based on the restrictive assumption that forecast errors average to zero over the sample. The second set of methods allows the term premium to vary over time, but the results based on the term structure of near-dated federal funds futures contracts are highly volatile, which perhaps reflects numerous technical factors in the underlying federal funds market. Finally, under an asset-pricing approach, the CAPM suggests that the risk premium on federal funds futures is either less than or equal to zero, while APT indicates that it can be positive.

This paper decomposes nominal Treasury yields into expected real rates, expected inflation rates, real risk premiums, and inflation risk premiums by separately calibrating a threefactor affine term structure model to the nominal Treasury and TIPS yield curves. Although this particular application seems to produce expected real short rates and inflation rates that are somewhat static, there are theoretical advantages to calibrating the model to nominal and real yields separately. Moreover, the estimates correlate positively with back-of-the-envelope measures of the inflation risk premium. With respect to the current environment, monetary policy uncertainty does not seem to have contributed to the apparent increase in the inflation risk premium since the beginning of 2006. Also, in purely nominal terms, the increase in term premiums thus far this year might be just as much a global as a domestic phenomenon, given that nominal term premiums have also increased in Germany and the United Kingdom. * The author thanks Don Kim, Brian Madigan, and Jonathan Wright. Any remaining errors are exclusively his own. The views presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Board or its staff.