The asymmetric impacts of oil price and shocks on inflation in BRICS: a multiple threshold nonlinear ARDL model

This study investigates the asymmetric impacts of oil price and component shocks on inflation in the context of BRICS countries. We firstly decompose the oil price change into supply, demand and risk shocks and subsequently establish an empirical framework to explore asymmetric pass-through using a novel multiple threshold nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model (MTNARDL). The extended model yields precise asymmetric estimates by splitting oil price change and disaggregated shocks into different partial sums. Our results reveal that significant asymmetries between oil price and inflation are only exhibited in China in the short run, suggests that inflationary effect is more dramatic when oil price decreases. For the supply shocks, strong asymmetries are found in Russia and China in the short term and in South Africa in the long term. Meanwhile demand shocks and risk shocks hold either nil asymmetry or weak, in most cases risk shocks have the weakest effect on inflation and the influence fading fast, demand shocks only exert impact temporarily during extreme fluctuation. Nonetheless, asymmetries are most important and significant at the highest and lowest quintiles. Considering the empirical results, this study provides some policy implications for policymakers and investors.