Monetary policymakers and long-term investors would benefit greatly from a measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real-time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures such as core inflation measures. This paper...

The Great Recession and worldwide financial crisis have exploded fiscal imbalances and brought fiscal policy and inflation to the forefront of policy concerns. Those concerns will only grow as aging populations increase demands on government expenditures in coming decades. It is widely perceived...

The relationship central to most inflation models, between slack and inflation, seems to have weakened. Do we need a new framework? This paper uses three very different approaches - principal components, a Phillips curve model, and trend-cycle decomposition - to show that inflation models should...

This paper studies the joint dynamics of real-time U.S. inflation and average inflation predictions of the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) based on sample ranging from 1968Q4 to 2017Q2. The joint data generating process (DGP) comprises an unobserved components (UC) model of inflation...

This paper estimates the Balassa-Samuelson effects for 11 countries in central and eastern Europe on a disaggregated set of quarterly data covering the period from the mid-1990s to the first quarter of 2008. The Balassa-Samuelson effects are clearly present and explain around 24% of inflation...

This paper examines the behaviour of exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices in India during the post-economic reforms initiated since the major devaluation of July 1991. It observes that there is no clear-cut evidence of a fall in exchange rate pass-through to domestic prices. Further,...

This paper highlights relative price adjustments taking place in the global economy as important sources of the lower levels of inflation rates observed in the recent decades. Using a markup model, it shows substantial effects from declines in wage costs and import prices relative to consumer...

The headline consumer price inflation (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This...

A common practice in studies using inflation forecasts is to approximate fixed-horizon forecasts with fixed-event ones. Here we show that this may be problematic. In a panel of US inflation forecast data that allows us to compare the two, the approximation results in a mean absolute...

Why is wage inflation so weak in spite of the recent sharp reduction in unemployment? We show that this may be due to an ongoing change in the composition of the labor supply. Indeed, the participation rate of workers aged between 55 and 64 has increased steadily over the last decade, from a...