Bond pricing formulas for Markov-modulated affine term structure models

Abstract

This article provides new developments in characterizing the class of regime-switching exponential affine interest rate processes in the context of pricing a zero-coupon bond. A finite-state Markov chain in continuous time dictates the random switching of time-dependent parameters of such processes. We present exact and approximate bond pricing formulas by solving a system of partial differential equations and minimizing an error functional. The bond price expression exhibits a representation that shows how it is explicitly impacted by the rate matrix and the time-dependent coefficient functions of the short rate models. We validate the bond pricing formulas numerically by examining a regime-switching Vasicek model.