Empirical evidence on jumps in the term structure of the US treasury market

The dynamics of US Treasury prices may be interrupted by jumps, and cojumps — where these occur simultaneously across the term structure. This paper finds significant evidence of jumps and cojumps in the US term structure using the Cantor-Fitzgerald tick dataset sampled over the period 2002–2006. While cojumping is frequently found in response to scheduled macroeconomic news announcement, around one-fifth of cojumps occur independently of news. The results are discussed in relation to term structure theories, day of the week effects, asymmetric news effects and trading volume.