Is gold a hedge against inflation? New evidence from a nonlinear ARDL approach

Thi Hong Van Hoang (), Amine Lahiani and David Heller

Economic Modelling, 2016, vol. 54, issue C, 54-66

Abstract: This paper aims to study the role of gold as a hedge against inflation based on local monthly gold prices in China, India, Japan, France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America in periods ranging from 1955 to 2015. We extend the literature by using a novel approach with the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) model (Shin et al., 2014). The main advantage of this model relies on its ability to simultaneously capture the short- and long-run asymmetries through positive and negative partial sum decompositions of changes in the independent variable(s). Moreover, we rely on local gold prices instead of those from London converted into local currencies like in most of previous studies. The results show that gold is not a hedge against inflation in the long run in all cases. In the short run, gold is an inflation hedge only in the UK, USA, and India. Furthermore, there is no long-run equilibrium between gold prices and the CPI in China, India and France. This difference may be due to traditional aspects of gold and custom controls for gold trade in these countries. Our robustness check suggests that the data time-frequency does not change the specification of the NARDL model but can change conclusions regarding the role of gold as a hedge against inflation in certain countries.

Keywords: Gold; Inflation; Nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags model (NARDL); GARCH structural break unit root test; Data frequency effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C58 E31 E44 G17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (125)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264999315004095
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:54:y:2016:i:c:p:54-66

DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2015.12.013

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly

More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().