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An Indicator of Future Inflation Extracted From the Steepness of the Interest Rate Yield Curve Along Its Entire Length

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Author Info
Jeffrey A. Frankel
Cara S. Lown

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Abstract

It is often suggested that the slope of the term structure of interest rates contains information about the expected future path of inflation. Mishkin (1990) has recently shown that the spread between the 12-month and 3-month interest rates helps to predict the difference between the 12-month and 3-month inflation rates. His approach however, lacks a theoretical foundation, other than the (rejected) hypothesis that the real interest rate is constant. This paper applies a simple existing theoretical framework, which allows the real interest rate to vary in the short run but converge to a constant in the long run, to the problem of predicting the inflation spread. It is shown that the appropriate indicator of expected inflation can make use of the entire length of the yield curve, in particular by estimating the steepness of a specific nonlinear transformation of the curve, rather than being restricted to a spread between two points. The resulting indicator, besides having a firmer theoretical foundation does a relatively good job of predicting the inflation rate over the period 1960 to 1988.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 3751.

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Date of creation: Jun 1991
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3751

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. N. Gregory Mankiw & Lawrence H. Summers, 1984. "Do Long-Term Interest Rates Overreact to Short-Term Interest Rates?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 15(1984-1), pages 223-248. [Downloadable!]
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  2. Mishkin, F.S., 1988. "The Information In The Term Structure: Some Further Results," Papers fb-_88-26, Columbia - Graduate School of Business.
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  3. Froot, Kenneth A, 1989. " New Hope for the Expectations Hypothesis of the Term Structure of Interest Rates," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 44(2), pages 283-305, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Mishkin, Frederic S, 1990. "The Information in the Longer Maturity Term Structure about Future Inflation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 105(3), pages 815-28, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Frankel, Jeffrey A, 1982. "A Technique for Extracting a Measure of Expected Inflation from the Interest Rate Term Structure," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 64(1), pages 135-42, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  6. Mishkin, Frederic S., 1990. "What does the term structure tell us about future inflation?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 77-95, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  7. Hardouvelis, Gikas A, 1988. " The Predictive Power of the Term Structure during Recent Monetary Regimes," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 43(2), pages 339-56, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  8. Philippe Jorion & Frederic Mishkin, 1991. "A Multi-Country Comparison of Term Structure Forecasts at Long Horizons," NBER Working Papers 3574, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Mishkin, Frederic S., 1990. "Does correcting for heteroscedasticity help?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 351-356, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Robert J. Shiller & J. Huston McCulloch, 1987. "The Term Structure of Interest Rates," NBER Working Papers 2341, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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