Measuring U.S. Core Inflation: The Stress Test of COVID-19

Measuring U.S. Core Inflation: The Stress Test of COVID-19 PDF Author: Laurence M. Ball
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1616357584
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 27

Get Book Here

Book Description
Large price changes in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have caused erratic fluctuations in the U.S. headline inflation rate. This paper compares alternative approaches to filtering out the transitory effects of these industry price changes and measuring the underlying or core level of inflation over 2020-2021. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of core, the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices (XFE), has performed poorly: over most of 2020-21, it is almost as volatile as headline inflation. Measures of core that exclude a fixed set of additional industries, such as the Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price inflation rate, have been less volatile, but the least volatile have been measures that filter out large price changes in any industry, such as the Cleveland Fed’s median inflation rate and the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean inflation rate. These core measures have followed smooth paths, drifting down when the economy was weak in 2020 and then rising as the economy has rebounded. Overall, we find that the case for the Federal Reserve to move away from the traditional XFE measure of core has strengthened during 2020-21.

Measuring U.S. Core Inflation: The Stress Test of COVID-19

Measuring U.S. Core Inflation: The Stress Test of COVID-19 PDF Author: Laurence M. Ball
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1616357584
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 27

Get Book Here

Book Description
Large price changes in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have caused erratic fluctuations in the U.S. headline inflation rate. This paper compares alternative approaches to filtering out the transitory effects of these industry price changes and measuring the underlying or core level of inflation over 2020-2021. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of core, the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices (XFE), has performed poorly: over most of 2020-21, it is almost as volatile as headline inflation. Measures of core that exclude a fixed set of additional industries, such as the Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price inflation rate, have been less volatile, but the least volatile have been measures that filter out large price changes in any industry, such as the Cleveland Fed’s median inflation rate and the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean inflation rate. These core measures have followed smooth paths, drifting down when the economy was weak in 2020 and then rising as the economy has rebounded. Overall, we find that the case for the Federal Reserve to move away from the traditional XFE measure of core has strengthened during 2020-21.

Measuring Us Core Inflation

Measuring Us Core Inflation PDF Author: Fabio C. Bagliano
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this paper the long-run trend in CPI inflation (core inflation) for the US over the 1960-2000 period is estimated using a common trends model. In this framework, core inflation is interpreted and constructed as the long-run forecast of inflation conditional on the information contained in nominal money growth, output fluctuations and movements in the oil price. Unlike other commonly used measures of core inflation, the common-trends core inflation rate exploits the long-run link between inflation and monetary growth, a strong feature of the data.

Measuring US Core Inflation

Measuring US Core Inflation PDF Author: Fabio C. Bagliano
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Inflation (Finance)
Languages : en
Pages : 25

Get Book Here

Book Description


Inflation Expectations

Inflation Expectations PDF Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135179778
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

Book Description
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.

Weighted Median Inflation Around the World: A Measure of Core Inflation

Weighted Median Inflation Around the World: A Measure of Core Inflation PDF Author: Laurence M. Ball
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 35

Get Book Here

Book Description
The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and compares the properties of this measure to those of standard core. For quarterly data, we find that the weighted median is less volatile than standard core, more closely related to economic slack, and more closely related to headline inflation over the next year. The weighted median also has a drawback: in most countries, it has a lower average level than headline inflation. We therefore also consider a measure of core inflation that eliminates this bias, which is based on the percentile of sectoral inflation rates that matches the sample average of headline CPI inflation.

A Review of Core Inflation and an Evaluation of Its Measures

A Review of Core Inflation and an Evaluation of Its Measures PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Measuring Core Inflation

Measuring Core Inflation PDF Author: Danny Quah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Inflation (Finance)
Languages : en
Pages : 40

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Great Inflation

The Great Inflation PDF Author: Michael D. Bordo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226066959
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.

Core Inflation Measures and Statistical Issues in Choosing Among Them

Core Inflation Measures and Statistical Issues in Choosing Among Them PDF Author: Mick Silver
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 60

Get Book Here

Book Description
This paper provides an overview of statistical measurement issues relating to alternative measures of core inflation, and the criteria for choosing among them. The approaches to measurement considered include exclusion-based methods, imputation methods, limited influence estimators, reweighting, and economic modeling. Criteria for judging which approach to use include credibility, control, deviations from a smoothed reference series, volatility, predictive ability, causality and cointegration tests, and correlation with money supply. Country practice can differ in how the approaches are implemented and how their appropriateness is assessed. There is little consistency in the results of country studies to readily suggest guidelines on accepted methods.

What is Keeping U.S. Core Inflation Low

What is Keeping U.S. Core Inflation Low PDF Author: Mr.Yasser Abdih
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1475533772
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over the past two decades, U.S. core PCE goods and services inflation have evolved differently. Against the backdrop of global concerns of low inflation, we use this trend as motivation to develop a bottom-up model of U.S. inflation. We find that domestic forces play a larger role relative to foreign factors in influencing core services inflation, while foreign factors predominantly drive core goods price changes. When comparing forecasting performance, we find that both the aggregate Phillips curve and the bottom up approach give low root mean square errors. The latter, however, is more informative in tracing the effects of shocks and understanding the exact channels through which they affect aggregate inflation. Using scenario analysis—and given a relatively low sensitivity of core inflation to changes in slack, both at the aggregate Phillips curve and sub-components levels—we find that global pressures will likely keep core PCE inflation below 2 percent for the foreseeable future unless the dollar starts to depreciate markedly and the unemployment rate goes well below the natural rate. These results support the accommodative stance of monetary policy pursued thus far and, going forward, underscore the need for proceeding cautiously and very gradually in raising the federal funds rate.