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American Economic Review Vol. 95 No. 1 2005

Extracting Inflation from Stock Returns to Test Purchasing Power Parity

Bhagwan Chowdhry1; Richard Roll1; Yihong Xia2

1 The Anderson School, UCLA, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1481. · 2 Department of Finance, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Abstract

Relative purchasing power parity (PPP) holds for pure price inflations, which affect prices of all goods and services by the same proportion, while leaving relative prices unchanged. Pure price inflations also affect nominal returns of all traded financial assets by exactly the same amount. Recognizing that relative PPP may not hold for the official inflation data constructed from commodity price indices because of relative price changes and other frictions that cause prices to be “sticky,” we provide a novel method for extracting a proxy for realized pure price inflation from stock returns. We find strong support for relative PPP in the short run using the extracted inflation measures.

DOI
10.1257/0002828053828554
Volume
95
Issue
1
Pages
255-276
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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