An empirical examination of the return distribution characteristics of agency mortgage pass-through securities

摘要

The study investigates whether the stable Paretian hypothesis is more adequate to explain the returns of US agency mortgage pass-through securities than the traditional normal distribution assumption. The daily returns of six representative index generics of Lehman Brothers are investigated in the framework of three different probabilistic models: independent, identically distributed model, the EWMA model, and the ARMA-GARCH model. It is found that the stable Paretian hypothesis better explains not only the tails but the central part of the distribution as well.