This presentation is part of: F40-1 Openness, Inflation, and Output

Assessing the Predictive Power of Alternative Indicators of Inflation

Farrokh Nourzad, Ph.D., Economics, Marquette University, PO Box 1881, College of Business Administration, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881

Over the years, central banks have used a number of different indicators of price inflation including the money growth rate, exchange rates, the unemployment gap, the GDP gap, and unit labor cost to name but a few.  This paper examines the relationship between several of these indicators and the rate of price inflation for the U.S. economy using cointegration tests and the associated error-correction (VEC) models.  Using this framework, we test for causality and weak and strong exogeneity, which help to determine whether a given indicator is a predictor of prices, prices are predictors of that indicator, or whether there is a feedback between the two.