Do Asset Prices Help to Predict Consumer Price Inflation

With goods prices being sticky, monetary impulses are initially transmitted to the real economy via changes in asset prices; and asset price fluctuations can independently affect monetary and real developments. Most empirical models try to incorporate such monetary-asset price interactions by the inclusion of a short-term interest rate and the exchange rate, but there are good reasons to doubt the sufficiency of this. Here we examine whether the predictive power of a reduced form equation for inflation, including standard explanatory variables, can be improved by adding other asset price variables, i.e. the changes in housing and equity prices and a yield spread. In our cross-country time series exercise, we find that housing price movements do provide useful extra information on future inflation, with equity prices and the yield spread being somewhat less informative. Copyright 2000 by Blackwell Publishers Ltd and The Victoria University of Manchester