Effect of fiscal expansion on inflation during the period of unconventional monetary policy

Abstract

Economic supply shocks and fiscal expansion coupled with monetary expansion are suspected causes of the rise in inflation that we observe in most of the developed and developing economies today. In this paper we look at the effect of the government budget deficit(surplus) or fiscal policy stance, and quantitative easing on inflation while controlling for economic shocks using the method of cointegration as we find data series in our model to be integrated of order one and having support of one cointegrating equation between the variables. Our analysis is performed using Federal Reserve monthly data from 1994 to 2022 using Two-Step Engle-Granger (1987) method and Fully Modified OLS by Phillips and Hansen (1990). We compare these models to Auto Regressive Distributed Lag model of Pesaran and Shin (1998) which allows for analysis irrespective of the order of integration to provide for more robustness regarding the estimated relationships in cases of misspecification of stationary properties in our time series. Both cointegrating models lend support to the initial postulated relationship where expansionary fiscal policy has significant positive impact on the price level during the long run but also enhances the effect of the Quantitative Easing on the price level as the interaction term between these variables is significant, indicating that during the periods of expansionary fiscal policy, expansionary monetary policy through Quantitative easing has bigger effect. Our analysis is performed controlling for effect of economic shocks and price of real exchange rate on the price level. Stability of the cointegration model tests reveal presence of structural breaks which when included in the cointegrating equation change the importance of the impact that fiscal stance has on inflation and reveal that inflation is mainly result of the expansion in central bank assets after 2008, which coincides with period of unconventional monetary policy