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Finance and Financial Management

Fordham University

Series

Inflation

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Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Business

The Behavior Of Money And Other Economic Variables: Two Natural Experiments, James R. Lothian, Cornelia H, Mccarthy Jan 2003

The Behavior Of Money And Other Economic Variables: Two Natural Experiments, James R. Lothian, Cornelia H, Mccarthy

CRIF Working Paper series

Every once in a great while, history provides us with a natural experiment, an episode in which a major change in a key economic variable occurs that has no direct relation to the contemporaneous behavior of the variables that theory suggests it ought to effect.1 A classic example was the currency reform during the U.S. Civil War by the Confederacy in spring 1864. A second was provided by the massive inflow of specie from the New World to Spain in the sixteenth century. In the first of these examples, a rapidly growing money stock suddenly fell and a decline in …


Equity Returns And Inflation: The Puzzlingly Long Lags, James R. Lothian, Cornelia Mccarthy May 2001

Equity Returns And Inflation: The Puzzlingly Long Lags, James R. Lothian, Cornelia Mccarthy

CRIF Working Paper series

This paper examines data for stock prices and price levels of 14 developed countries during the post-WWII era and compares their behavior in that sample with behavior over the past two centuries in the UK and the US. Contrary to much of the literature of the past several decades, we find that nominal equity prices do, in fact, keep pace with movements in the overall price level. Our results suggest, however, that this is only the case over long periods. The puzzle therefore is not that equities fail the test as inflation hedges, as had been quite widely believed, but …