Can US Wage Increases be Regarded as a Leading Indicator for Bond Rates?

Abstract

After the subprime meltdown, the Federal Reserve focused its attention on US non-farm payroll data in order to pave the way for its fund rate hikes. As time went by,the Federal Reserve deemed particularly one sub-component of this data, namely theincrements on average weekly wage growth as a proxy for inflation and thus a plausibleexplanation for raising the interest rates. In that aspect, we decide to elaborate on thisissue further and examine whether this implemented strategy indeed had a reflection inthe real market. For doing so, we intend to determine whether there is any causalityrelation in either direction between US average weekly wage increases and 10-yearTreasury Bond rates. We utilize the Toda-Yamamoto causality approach and comeup with a statistically significant result between wages and bond rates. For robustness,we also consider the unemployment rate and consumption expenditures as independentvariables.