Duration measures the average life of an asset or liability in economic terms. As such, duration has economic meaning as the interest sensitivity (or interest elasticity) of an asset’s value to changes in the interest rate. Duration differs from maturity as a measure of interest rate sensitivity because duration takes into account the time of arrival and the rate of reinvestment of all cash flows during the assets life. Technically, duration is the weighted-average time to maturity using the relative present values of the cash flows as the weights.