Is Money Supply Exogenous? Evidence from India

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the claim that the rising growth rate of money is one of the major factors behind India’s recent bout of elevated and sticky inflation, this article asks: Is money supply exogenous or endogenous, and can it predict future inflation. This question is investigated using the monetarist framework of inflation. In the empirical analysis of data spanning from 1970–71 to 2009–10, the results of both the monetarist and the error-correction models suggest that money supply accounts for inflation in India. There is also the presence of an error-correction mechanism among money, inflation and output. However, a monetarist equation does not tell anything about causality. Thus, the vector autoregression (VAR) method is used to detect the direction of causality between money supply and the inflation rate. Findings from Granger causality tests suggest weak evidence of inflation (Granger) causing money supply. As a robustness check, we estimate VAR models using quarterly data and, further, using core inflation. The results of the causality tests from the quarterly data, the impulse response function and forecast error variance decomposition suggest that money supply is weakly endogenous. JEL Classification: E31, E51, E52