The money-inflation nexus revisited

This paper proposes a Bayesian Logistic Smooth Transition Autoregressive (LSTAR) model with stochastic volatility (SV) to model inflation dynamics in a nonlinear fashion. Inflationary regimes are determined by smoothed money growth which serves as a transition variable that governs the transition between regimes. We apply this approach on quarterly data from the US, the UK and Canada and are able to identify well-known, high inflation periods in the samples. Moreover, our results suggest that the role of money growth is specific to the economy under scrutiny. Finally, we analyse a variety of different model specifications and are able to confirm that adjusted money growth still has leading indicator properties on inflation regimes.