Oil sentiment and the U.S. inflation premium

Abstract

In this paper, we employ a new dataset to measure the impact of investor sentiment regarding oil prices on the U.S. inflation premium. Our empirical analysis relies on Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) and out-of-sample forecasts. The results indicate that a one standard deviation positive shock to overall investor sentiment regarding oil prices results in a significant increase in the U.S. inflation premium by approximately 1.2% over the subsequent 10 weeks. Compared to individual investor sentiment, institutional investor sentiment regarding oil prices has a larger impact on the U.S. inflation premium. Finally, we find an out-of-sample evidence that the overall investor sentiment regarding oil prices has predictive power on the U.S. inflation premium.