James Lothian

Oil prices, commodity prices and American monetary policy, the last operating through a variety of channels, have all figures prominently in explanations of the international inflation process in the last 1960s and early '70s. Our major purpose in this paper is to test these various hypotheses. We do so in the context of a reduced-form rational-expectations price equation which we estimate for the United States and seven other industrial countries using quarterly data for the period 1955 through 1976. The principal conclusion that emerges from this exercise is that movements in domestic money in these countries served as the key link in the inflation process. The factors that produced these monetary changes, however, differed among countries. Price shocks of various sorts were clearly of s...

Published: Economic Inquiry, Vol. 21, no. 3 (1983): 295-311. citation courtesy of

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation into timing relationships between variables within and across industrialized countries. In the analysis we highlight the two polar cases of completely closed and open economies and draw some implications for timing between monetary expansion and inflation, inter-country comparisons of inflation rates and interest rates, and comparisons of central bank behavior. The Granger-causality test is applied in a bivariate fashion to these groups of variables. The main empirical results of our analysis are: (1) Domestic monetary expansion appears to lead inflation in the sense that money Granger-causes prices without feedback, contradicting an implication of the monetary approach to the balance of payments. (2) Hardly any significant timi...

Published: Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 10, no. 1 (1982): 1-24. citation courtesy of