To accurately forecast the future rate of inflation, it is imperative to account for inflation’s underlying trend. This is especially important for medium- to long-run forecasts. In this Commentary I demonstrate a simple but powerful technique for incorporating this trend into standard...

In the face of falling house prices, decreasing rates of homeownership, and a glut of vacant homes, the Consumer Price Index’s measure of the cost of owner-occupied housing—owners’ equivalent rent of residence (OER)—has begun to accelerate, rising at an annualized rate of 2.3 percent...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Society of Business Economists Annual Conference, London, England, June 9, 2011

Economists have been arguing about the connection between unemployment and infl ation for decades. Critics claim that the connection is unreliable and leads policymakers astray, while others argue that the relationship is useful for forecasting. We examine the more direct connections between...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia> Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at Wharton, Fall Members’ Meeting, October 12, 2011

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Business Leaders Forum, Villanova School of Business, September 29, 2011>

We study discretionary equilibrium in the Calvo pricing model for a monetary authority that chooses the money supply. The steady-state inflation rate is above 8 percent for a baseline calibration, but it varies substantially with alternative structural parameter values. If the initial condition...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Global Interdependence Center’s 2011 Global Citizen Award Luncheon, Union League Club, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 8, 2011

In the face of falling house prices, decreasing rates of homeownership, and a glut of vacant homes, the Consumer Price Index’s measure of the cost of owner-occupied housing—owners’ equivalent rent of residence (OER)—has begun to accelerate, rising at an annualized rate of 2.3 percent...

We derive and estimate a New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in a model where consumers are assumed to have deep habits. Habits are deep in the sense that they apply to individual consumption goods instead of aggregate consumption. This alters the NKPC in a fundamental manner as it introduces...