Spillover Effects of Real and Nominal Uncertainties in India

This paper examines the spillover effects and the causality between inflation, output growth and its uncertainties for India. Using monthly data for the period from April 1980 to April 2011, we estimated a bi-variate GARCH in mean with BEKK representations. This study differs from the earlier works where the parameters in the BEKK representations are estimated individually and the inferences are drawn on the basis of the individual lagged variance, covariance, and error terms from the respective equations. The empirical evidence suggests that inflation uncertainty seems to have significant negative impact on output growth and positive impact on output uncertainty and there is a positive influence of output uncertainty on the inflation. More importantly, there are spillovers and volatility transmission effects between the macroeconomic uncertainties where the volatility in output growth is significantly influenced by the shocks and volatility in inflation.

     

Efficiency Decomposition in two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis: An application to Life Insurance companies in India

Journal of Quantitative Economics - This paper evaluates the efficiency of Indian Life Insurance Industry by employing two-stage Relational data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology to derive...     

Monetary aggregates and core inflation: evidence from India

This study constructs a model-based core inflation for India using Divisia monetary aggregates instead of traditional money measures with the methodology proposed by Bagliano and Morana (2003) and evaluates its forecasting abilities. The core inflation derived from Divisia monetary aggregates is found to be a better leading indicator of measured inflation than the core inflation derived from traditional money measures. These results argue for a case in favour of using monetary aggregates in the construction of core inflation for policy purposes.     

Stock prices, inflation and output: Evidence from wavelet analysis

The negative relationship between real stock return and inflation puzzled many as it contradicts conventional Fisherian wisdom. Fama [Fama, E.F. (1981), “Stock returns, real activity, inflation and money”, American Economic Review, 71(September), 545–564.] gave an explanation for this negative relationship with two propositions that links real stock return and inflation through real output. This study revisits Fama's hypothesis for India in the post-liberalized period from a developing country perspective. Examining this relationship on the time-scale decomposition from a wavelet multi-resolution analysis suggests that Fama's hypothesis holds only for the long time scale and remains as a puzzle for the other time scales.     

Inflation and the Dispersion of Relative Prices: A Case for 4 % Solution

Unlike earlier literature that documented positive association between inflation and the dispersion of relative prices over time, the empirical evidence from this study suggests that the relative price dispersion increases in response to the deviation of inflation from certain threshold/target level in either direction rather than inflation per se. The striking feature of the empirical evidence from United States and Japan is that the inflation rate at which the dispersion of relative prices is minimised turn out to be 4%; hence, supporting the proposal of 4% inflation target for both the countries.     

The Dynamics Between Inflation and Inflation Uncertainty: Evidence from India

This study examines the causal nexus between inflation and inflation uncertainty. In this regard, conventional Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models and Stochastic Volatility (SV) models are used to measure inflation uncertainty and Bai and Perron (Econometrica 66:47–78, 1998; J Appl Econom 18:1–22, 2003) test is used to identify structural breaks in inflation. The empirical evidence derived from the monthly data for the period from June 1961 to April 2011 suggests that the measure of inflation uncertainty obtained from SV model is more reliable than the measure obtained from GARCH model and also the causal nexus between inflation and inflation uncertainty seems to be significantly conditional upon the measure of uncertainty used. The structural break test identifies four episodes of inflation during the sample period, and the causality between inflation and its variability varies across different episodes. The inflation and its variance seem to be independent of each other during the first two regimes that cover the period from 1960 to 1980 and on the contrary, during the later period largely bidirectional causality is observed. Further, inflation seems to exert positive impact on inflation uncertainty, whereas inflation uncertainty has negative impact on inflation.