Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae … different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of … how accurately the CPI informs us about "true" inflation. We use the largest price and quantity dataset ever employed in …

Two strands of the literature suggest that PPI inflation, rather than CPI inflation, should be the targeting variable … in a monetary policy rule. The distinction between these two rules would only be important if the two inflation indices … do not co-move strongly. The first contribution of this paper is to document that the two inflation gauges did co …

Inflation dynamics have been difficult to explain over the last decade. This paper explores if a more comprehensive … treatment of globalization can help. CPI inflation has become more synchronized around the world since the 2008 crisis, but core … and wage inflation have become less synchronized. Global factors (including commodity prices, world slack, exchange rates …

An important input to monetary policymaking is estimating the current level of inflation. This paper examines … empirically whether the measurement of trend inflation can be improved by using disaggregated data on sectoral inflation to … construct indexes akin to core inflation, but with time-varying distributed lags of weights, where the sectoral weight depends …

2017 to shed light on how online inflation compares to overall inflation, and to gauge the magnitude of new product bias … online. The Adobe data contain transaction prices and quantities purchased. We estimate that online inflation was about 1 … online, implies roughly 2 percentage points lower inflation than in a matched model/CPI-style index …

This paper studies the value of broad commodity price indexes as predictors of consumer price inflation in the G-7 … prices and the conditions under which, in general, one would expect commodity prices to be a leading indicator of inflation … inflation. We find that commodity and consumer prices are not co-integrated; the hypothesis that there is a reliable long …

for the persistence and volatility of "reset price inflation." Reset price inflation is the rate of change of all desired … construct an empirical measure of reset price inflation. We find that time-dependent models imply unrealistically high … persistence and stability of reset price inflation. This discrepancy is exacerbated by adding strategic complementarities, even …

This paper investigates the use of trimmed means as high-frequency estimators of" inflation. The known characteristics … that simple averages of price data are" unlikely to produce efficient estimates of inflation. Trimmed means produce … superior estimates" of core inflation,' which we define as a long-run centered moving average of CPI and PPI" inflation. We …

As inflation approaches zero, it becomes increasingly important to examine the price indices on which monetary policy … index of the cost-of-living, is that there are likely to be biases in the index as a measure of inflation. In this paper we … inherent in the CPI as a measure of inflation--weighting bias. Utilizing a dynamic factor model we are able to compute the …

The debate over including asset prices in the construction of an inflation statistic has attracted renewed attention in … inflation at the retail level. In this paper, we take an alternative, longer-term perspective on the issue and argue that the … exclusion of asset prices introduces an 'excluded goods bias' in the computation of the inflation statistic that is of interest …