Zero-coupon bond

A zero-coupon bond makes one payment at maturity and no earlier coupon payments. A unit-face-value bond maturing at $T$ has terminal value $P_T^T=1$.

The continuously compounded yield of a unit-face zero-coupon bond is the constant rate producing its current discount factor over the remaining maturity. It equals the maturity average of the instantaneous forward rate. Differentiation gives $f(t,T)=R(t,T)+(T-t)R_T(t,T)$, and both rates tend to the short rate as $T\downarrow t$. This definition uses continuous compounding; quoted coupon-bond yields require a different cash-flow equation.

Buy one maturity-$(T-1)$ bond and short $1+f$ maturity-$T$ bonds. Reinvest the first bond's unit maturity payoff in $1/P_{T-1}(T)$ maturity-$T$ bonds. This self-financing portfolio pays $r_T-f$ at $T$. The replication uses only the adjacent maturities and does not require completeness of the whole bond market.

In the model $d{r}_t=r_t(r_t-1)(dt+d{W}_t)$ under the pricing measure, with $0\le r_t\le 1$, the discounted affine expression $D_t[A(T-t)+B(T-t)r_t]$ has zero drift when $A^{\prime }=0$ and $B^{\prime }=-A-B$. Terminal conditions $A(0)=1$, $B(0)=0$ yield the displayed unit bond price. The expression is bounded, so the bounded local martingale criterion justifies pricing by conditional expectation.

For the bounded rate diffusion of linear bond pricing in a bounded short-rate diffusion, $D_t{e}^{-(T-t)}{r}_t$ is a bounded martingale with terminal value $D_T{r}_T$. Dividing its conditional expectation by $D_{t}P(t,T)$ through the Bayes formula for conditional expectation gives the displayed forward-measure expectation. It lies between zero and one.

If a discrete-time martingale deflator obeys $Y_t/Y_{t-1}=e^{X_t}$ for an affine process $X$, unit zero-coupon bonds have exponential-affine prices. For one-step coefficients $A,B$, the recursion is $\alpha (0)=\beta (0)=0$, $\alpha (n+1)=A(1+\alpha (n))$, $\beta (n+1)=\beta (n)+B(1+\alpha (n))$.

For an affine autoregressive process $r_T=\beta r_{T-1}+{\xi }_T$, suppose its initial zero-coupon bond prices $q(T)$ are positive and finite. A deterministic shift $h_T$ of the rate changes the bond price to $q(T)\exp (-{\sum }_{s=1}^T{h}_s)$. To fit any positive curve $p(T)$ with $p(0)=1$, put $d_T=\log q(T)-\log p(T)$, $d_0=0$, $h_T=d_T-d_{T-1}$ and $h_0=0$. Adding the deterministic drift ${\alpha }_T=h_T-\beta h_{T-1}$ to the rate recursion realizes precisely this shift, and telescoping gives the desired curve. No stationary autoregression assumption is needed.