Forecasting Inflation Uncertainty in the G7 Countries

Segnon Mawuli, Bekiros Stelios, Wilfling Bernd

Abstract
There is substantial evidence that inflation rates are characterized by long memory and nonlinearities. In this paper, we introduce a long-memory Smooth TransitionAutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average-Markov Switching Multifractal specification [STARFIMA(p,d,q)-MSM(k)] for modeling and forecasting inflation uncertainty. We first provide the statistical properties of the process and investigate the finite-sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimators through simulation. Second, we evaluate the out-of-sample forecast performance of the model in forecasting inflation uncertainty in the G7 countries. Our empirical analysis demonstrates the superiority of the new model over the alternative STARFIMA(p,d,q)-GARCH-type models in forecasting inflation uncertainty.

Keywords
Inflation uncertainty; Smooth transition; Multifractal processes; GARCH processes