TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lamont, Owen
TI  - Do "Shortages" Cause Inflation?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5402
PY  - 1995
Y2  - December 1995
DO  - 10.3386/w5402
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5402
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5402.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Owen Lamont
Wellington Asset Management
E-Mail: owen.a.lamont@gmail.com
M1  - published as Owen Lamont. "Do "Shortages" Cause Inflation?," in Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer, Editors, "Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy" University of Chicago Press (1997)

AB  - I count the number of times per month that the word `shortage' appears on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for the period 1969-1994.  Using this as a  general measure of shortages in the US economy, I test whether shortages help predict inflation.  Using a variety of different specifications, I find that this time-series measure of shortages strongly predicts inflation, and contains information not captured by commodity prices, monetary aggregates, interest rates, and other proposed predictors of inflation.  This suggests that disequilibrium was an important part of the adjustment of prices to macroeconomic shocks during this period.
ER  -