Includes bibliographical references (p. 17).

Survey measures of consumer inflation expectations have an important shortcoming in that, while providing useful summary measures of the distribution of point forecasts across individuals, they contain no direct information about an individual's uncertainty about future inflation. The latter is...

Central banks analyze a wide range of data to obtain better measures of underlying inflationary pressures. Factor models have widely been used to formalize this procedure. Using a dynamic factor model this paper develops a measure of underlying inflation (UIG) at time horizons of relevance for...

Disagreement among economic forecasters about the future path of inflation has risen substantially since the start of the recession. The nature of this disagreement varies with the forecast time horizon, with some forecasters expecting much lower short-run inflation and others anticipating much...

This paper formalizes the process of updating the nowcast and forecast on output and inflation as new releases of data become available. The marginal contribution of a particular release for the value of the signal and its precision is evaluated by computing "news" on the basis of an evolving...

Using the probabilistic responses from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study the evolution of uncertainty and disagreement associated with inflation forecasts in the United States since 1968. We compare and contrast alternative measures summarizing the distributions of mean forecasts...

A much debated question among economists is the usefulness of the Phillips curve as a tool for forecasting inflation. This Economic Letter presents some quantitative comparisons between a Phillips curve-based inflation forecast and an alternative forecast that is constructed as a weighted moving...

There has been a resurgence of interest in dynamic factor models for use by policy advisors. Dynamic factor methods can be used to incorporate a wide range of economic information when forecasting or measuring economic shocks. This article introduces dynamic factor models that underlie the...

This paper proposes a new procedure for shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on factor analysis. Our identification scheme for information shocks relies on data reduction techniques for daily panels and the recognition that macroeconomic releases exhibit a high level of...

Can government policies that increase the monopoly power of firms and the militancy of unions increase output? This paper studies this question in a dynamic general equilibrium model with nominal frictions and shows that these policies are expansionary when certain "emergency" conditions apply....