Positivity of mild solutions to stochastic evolution equations with an application to forward rates

Abstract We prove a maximum principle for mild solutions to stochastic evolution equations with (locally) Lipschitz coefficients and Wiener noise on weighted $$L^2$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msup> </mml:math> spaces. As an application, we provide sufficient conditions for the positivity of forward rates in the Heath-Jarrow-Morton model, considering the associated Musiela SPDE on a homogeneous weighted Sobolev space.