Forecasts of the rate of price inflation play a central role in the formulation of monetary policy, and forecasting … inflation is a key job for economists at the Federal Reserve Board. This paper examines whether this job has become harder and …, to the extent that it has, what changes in the inflation process have made it so. The main finding is that the univariate …

A key policy question is: How high an inflation rate should central banks target? This depends crucially on the costs … of inflation. An important concern is that high inflation will lead to inefficient price dispersion. Workhorse New … Keynesian models imply that this cost of inflation is very large. An increase in steady state inflation from 0% to 10% yields a …

This paper presents new evidence on cost-of-living indices and annual inflation rates for the elderly population as … the differences in the inflation faced by the elderly and the general population, as well as within the elderly group … itself. We conclude that, conditional on a housing adjustment, the inflation experience of the elderly from 1961-1981 was …

curve can account for inflation not just in the U.S. but across a range of countries, once household or firm-level inflation … expectations are used. Given this relationship, we can infer the dynamics of slack from the dynamics of inflation gaps and vice … versa. We find that the implied slack was pushing inflation below expectations in the years after the Great Recession but …

Price inflation in the U.S. has been sluggish and slow to pick up in the last two decades. We show that this missing … inflation can be traced to a growing disconnect between unemployment and core goods inflation. We exploit rich industry … slow inflation pick-up in the last two decades. We set up a theoretical framework where markups and pass-through are a …

Japan suffered a very high inflation rate in 1973-74. The CPI inflation rate rose to near 30% in 1974, the highest rate …, the oil crisis is blamed for the 1973-74 high inflation. However, due to monetary policy decisions in 1972-73, the … inflation rate had already exceeded 10% before the onset of the oil crisis in October 1973. These decisions include the interest …

A standard statistical perspective on the U.S. Great Inflation is that it involves an increase in the stochastic trend … rate of inflation, defined as the long-term forecast of inflation at each point in time. That perspective receives support …, and statistical studies of U.S. inflation dynamics. We show that a textbook macroeconomic model delivers such a stochastic …

stable inflation behavior will be generated -- is incorrect. This is because New Keynesian (NK) models are typically … consistent with the existence of RE paths with explosive inflation rates (in addition to one or more stable paths) that normally … imply the absence of explosive inflation. That result does not, however, justify negative conclusions about NK analysis. For …

This paper surveys the literature since 1993 on pseudo out-of-sample evaluation of inflation forecasts in the United …