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Does the stock market react to unexpected inflation differently across the business cycle?

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  • Chao Wei

Abstract

I find that nominal equity returns respond to unexpected inflation more negatively during contractions than expansions. In particular, returns on firms with lower book-to-market ratio, or of medium size, demonstrate strong asymmetric correlations with unexpected inflation across the business cycle. The cross-sectional correlations of returns on book-to-market and size portfolios with unexpected inflation mostly reflect the heterogeneous factor loadings of these portfolios on one of the Fama-French factors, namely, the excess market return. By examining the cyclical responses to unexpected inflation of the three primitive forces which determine stock prices: the discount rate, the expected growth rate of real activity and the equity risk premium, I find that changes in expected real activity and the equity premium, signalled by unexpected inflation, are important in explaining the asymmetric responses of the stock market to unexpected inflation across the business cycle.

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  • Chao Wei, 2009. "Does the stock market react to unexpected inflation differently across the business cycle?," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(24), pages 1947-1959.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:apfiec:v:19:y:2009:i:24:p:1947-1959
    DOI: 10.1080/09603100903282622
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Ciner, Cetin, 2015. "Are equities good inflation hedges? A frequency domain perspective," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(C), pages 12-17.
    2. Adel A. Al-Sharkas & Marwan Al-Zoubi, 2011. "Stock Prices and Inflation: Evidence from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Morocco," Working Papers 653, Economic Research Forum, revised 12 Jan 2011.
    3. Neeraj J. Gupta & Vitaliy Strohush & Reilly White, 2019. "Investor reaction to simultaneous news releases: unemployment vs. earnings," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer;Academy of Economics and Finance, vol. 43(4), pages 735-749, October.
    4. Iman Ghasemian Sahebi & Seyed Pendar Toufighi & Gencay Karakaya & Shahryar Ghorbani, 2022. "An intuitive fuzzy approach for evaluating financial resiliency of supply chain," OPSEARCH, Springer;Operational Research Society of India, vol. 59(2), pages 460-481, June.
    5. Cetin Ciner, 2015. "Are equities good inflation hedges? A frequency domain perspective," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 24(1), pages 12-17, January.

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