Inflation and Financial Market Performance: What Have We Learned in the Last Ten Years?

The last decade has witnessed a great deal of theoretical and empirical research on the relationships between inflation, financial market performance, and economic growth. This paper provides a survey of that literature and presents new cross-country empirical results on this topic. We find that inflation is negatively associated with banking industry size, real returns on financial assets, and bank profitability. We also discover a positive relationship between asset return volatility and inflation.