Disaggregated Evidence for Exchange Rate and Import Price Pass-through in the Light of Identification Issues, Aggregation Bias and Heterogeneity

For emerging market economies, changes in import prices and exchange rate are among the major determinants of inflation. In general, studies analyzing the pass-through of foreign prices into inflation consider the headline inflation. However, such an approach may suffer from aggregation bias and may not reveal the differences in pass-through due to heterogeneous nature of the CPI. In this paper, we try to investigate the impact of such issues on the pass-through analysis for Turkey over the sample period of 2005-2015. We propose a disaggregated approach and run an extended VAR model for each of 152 subcomponents of the CPI separately. Then, we aggregate the individual impulse-responses of those components with significantly positive response to exchange rate and import prices. Our results reveal a significant heterogeneity in pass-through coefficients across subcomponents of the CPI. We show that the foreign price pass-through is also sizeable in food and services, as well as in core goods and energy. Our findings further point to a clear aggregation bias. Once the disaggregated approach is used, we report a higher pass-through from the exchange rate to the headline inflation.