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Inflation volatility is one of the key constituents of inflation dynamics and has not received much attention in the literature. The study of inflation volatility is important because it has adverse economic consequences. This thesis aims to study the determinants of inflation volatility for advanced and developing countries. At the outset, I explore the empirical regularities of inflation volatility based on monthly and quarterly CPI inflation data (1968 to 2011) using time and frequency domain analysis. I establish a stylised fact that inflation is significantly more volatile in developing countries than advanced countries. This raises a research question why it is so. Using a New Keynesian paradigm, an answer to this research question is sought from two angles. First, a policy rule for interest rate (known as Taylor rule) is estimated over a balanced panel of advanced and developing countries to examine the difference in policy activism between these two groups of countries. This follows from the New Keynesian argument that an active monetary policy is a necessary condition for stable dynamics of inflation. Using the Generalized Method of Moments and the Arellano and Bover (1995) method of dynamic panel estimation, I find that monetary policy is active in advanced countries but passive in developing economies. This striking difference in the policy regimes between these two groups can be one of the reasons for the difference in inflation volatility. Second, motivated by the asymmetry in consumption basket of CPI between advanced and developing economies, a two-sector New Keynesian model with food and non-food is developed. The model features: i) composite consumption and labour index, ii) differential Calvo-type price adjustment of firms across sectors, and iii) Taylor type monetary policy rule. Characterising the distinct structures of advanced and developing economies by two different parameterizations, the model calibration shows that demand disturbance generated by the preference shock is one of the fundamental forces for inflation volatility. In addition, my simulation analysis demonstrates that other structural parameters such as the frequency of price adjustment, distribution of labour and the elasticity of labour substitution, and the policy parameter of inflation in the Taylor rule are also critical factors explaining the greater volatility of inflation in developing economies.
The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze empirically and theoretically the impact of the decrease in inflation volatility versus the impact of the improvement in institutions on growth and development. The first chapter of this dissertation estimates the effects of inflation and inflation volatility on economic growth in the presence of different degrees of legal and financial institutions. The main contribution of this chapter is to show that while the level of inflation does not have a significant effect on growth, which is in line with previous studies; inflation volatility does significantly impact growth even for countries with moderately high levels on inflation. In addition, improving either legal or financial institutions has a statistically significant positive impact on growth and helps to reduce the negative impact of inflation volatility on growth. The second chapter analyzes the channel through which inflation volatility and financial institutions affect a country's ability to borrow on international capital markets; which affects their ability to invest and therefore grow. The findings of this chapter show that reducing inflation volatility or improving financial institutions will significantly improve a country's sovereign debt rating leading to a drop in its cost of borrowing, which is to be quantified. One important contribution of this chapter is to show that it is inflation volatility that is important in determining a country's sovereign debt rating rather than the level of inflation which has been argued in the literature. The welfare implications of the decrease in inflation volatility versus the improvement in institutions are quantified in chapter three. This chapter analyzes a micro-foundation based small open economy model that is used to help fully understand the dynamics of a decrease in inflation volatility and an improvement in institutions for a developing economy. The study finds that the welfare effect of improving institutions and of reducing inflation volatility is large with the largest effect being caused by an improvement in financial institutions. One policy implication of these results is that developing economies can get larger welfare gains from improving their institutions than from reducing inflation volatility.
A volume that celebrates and develops the work of Nobel Laureate Robert Engle, it includes original contributions from some of the world's leading econometricians that further Engle's work in time series economics
The principal objective of this thesis is to evaluate appropriate measures of inflation which are to be applicable for implementing monetary policy in developing countries. The first essay attempts to assess real effects of high inflation episodes for Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan. In order to investigate the real effects of high inflation episodes, the study adopts an indicator for the inflationary real effect, named inflationary real response (IRR), which is the difference between the expected and output-neutral inflation. Both the expected and output-neutral inflation are computed as the decomposition of shocks induced in the vector autoregressive (VAR) model. The main finding of this chapter is that there is a positive real effect in economic growth in the period after high inflation. The second essay investigates the responses of real output and inflation to oil price, aggregate supply and demand shocks in the four Asian developing countries; Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Thailand. The structural VAR model is used to identify the different shocks and to explore the relative contributions of these shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations. It is found that oil price shocks have negligible effects on economic activities for all the examined countries. However, aggregate supply and demand shocks are key sources of variation in output and inflation. The final essay examines whether the central bank should target a broader measure of the price index that incorporates stock prices alongside the prices of current goods and services. The primary contribution of this chapter is the estimation of a price index that can be efficiently utilised by central banks aiming to minimise output volatility. The results suggest that the central bank should use a price index that gives a sizeable weight to the fundamental component of stock prices to minimise output gap variance.