Turner College Economist Publishes Timely Study on Inflation

With high inflation rates currently posing a problem in countries all around the globe, a new study by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and his colleague Puneet Vatsa of Lincoln University in New Zealand on business cycles and inflation is almost perfectly timed.  The study, which was recently accepted for publication by the International Journal of Monetary Economics and Finance, updates stylized facts about the cyclical associations between economic output and prices.  In it, Vatsa and Mixon apply the relatively new Hamilton filter, a statistical approach that lends itself well to extracting the cyclical components from non-stationary data series in small samples, to price and output series for 27 countries, including the U.S., from 1999 through 2020.  The study finds mixed evidence regarding the cyclicality of inflation (i.e., the relationship between business cycles and inflation).  For example, Vatsa and Mixon report that inflation is acyclical in India, the United Kingdom, and the Euro Area, while it is weakly procyclical in Canada and the U.S., strongly procyclical in China, and strongly countercyclical in Brazil.

 

The International Journal of Monetary Economics and Finance publishes both applied and policy-oriented research, with an emphasis on empirical studies in monetary economics, international economics, financial economics and financial markets from developed and developing economies.