Can urban coffee consumption help predict US inflation?

Salisu, Afees A; Swaray, Raymond; Adediran, Idris A

Abstract

Motivated by the importance of coffee to Americans and the significance of the coffee subsector to the US economy, we pursue three notable innovations. First, we augment the traditional Phillips curve model with the coffee price as a predictor, and show that the resulting model outperforms the traditional variant in both in-sample and out-of-sample predictability of US inflation. Second, we demonstrate the need to account for the inherent statistical features of predictors such as persistence, endogeneity, and conditional heteroskedasticity effects when dealing with US inflation. Consequently, we offer robust illustrations to show that the choice of estimator matters for improved US inflation forecasts. Third, the proposed augmented Phillips curve also outperforms time series models such as autoregressive integrated moving average and the fractionally integrated version for both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasts. Our results show that augmenting the traditional Phillips curve with the urban coffee price will produce better forecast results for US inflation only when the statistical effects are captured in the estimation process. Our results are robust to alternative measures of inflation, different data frequencies, higher order moments, multiple data samples and multiple forecast horizons.

Citation

Salisu, A. A., Swaray, R., & Adediran, I. A. (2019). Can urban coffee consumption help predict US inflation?. Journal of forecasting, 38(7), 649-668. https://doi.org/10.1002/for.2589

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 8, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Apr 25, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019-11
• Deposit Date: Apr 18, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 26, 2021
• Journal: Journal of Forecasting
• Print ISSN: 0277-6693
• Electronic ISSN: 1099-131x
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 38
• Issue: 7
• Pages: 649-668
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/for.2589
• Keywords: USA; Phillips curve; Coffee price; Inflation forecasts; Forecast evaluation
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1378827
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/for.2589
• Additional Information: Received: 2018-04-23; Accepted: 2019-03-08; Published: 2019-04-25
• Contract Date: Apr 23, 2019