Can Us Wage Increases Be Regarded as A\rleading Indicator for Bond Rates

Abstract

After the subprime meltdown, the Federal Reserve focused its attention on US non-\rfarm payroll data in order to pave the way for its fund rate hikes. As time went by,\rthe Federal Reserve deemed particularly one sub-component of this data, namely the\rincrements on average weekly wage growth as a proxy for in\ration and thus a plausible\rexplanation for raising the interest rates. In that aspect, we decide to elaborate on this\rissue further and examine whether this implemented strategy indeed had a re\rection in\rthe real market. For doing so, we intend to determine whether there is any causality\rrelation in either direction between US average weekly wage increases and 10-year\rTreasury Bond rates. We utilize the Toda-Yamamoto causality approach and come\rup with a statistically signicant result between wages and bond rates. For robustness,\rwe also consider the unemployment rate and consumption expenditures as independent\rvariables.