The ability of central banks to differentiate between permanent and transitory price movements is critical for the conduct of monetary policy. The importance of gauging the persistence of price changes in a timely manner has led to the development of measures of underlying, or “core,”...

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...

Providing for shelter represents a large portion of the typical household budget. Accordingly, rent, paid either to a landlord or to oneself as an owner-occupant, has a large weight in the CPI and in the personal consumption expenditures deflator, resulting in substantial scrutiny of how tenant...

Many economists expect inflation to rise in 1995. These expectations are based on various approaches to forecasting inflation. One approach is based on the standard economic theory that inflation rises when slack is eliminated from the economy and production exceeds capacity constraints....

Analysts seeking evidence of rising inflation often focus on the movements of a single indicator_an increase in the price of gold, for example, or a decline in the unemployment rate. But simple statistical tests reveal that such indicators, used in isolation, have very limited predictive power.

Despite posting their strongest sustained performance in many years, recent measures of output and productivity growth have still fallen short of their 1960-73 averages. Could data-measurement problems affecting the pricing of some services account for the inability of these widely tracked U.S....

This paper reports preliminary findings from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York research program aimed at improving survey measures of inflation expectations. We find that seemingly small differences in how inflation is referred to in a survey can lead respondents to consider significantly...

As in Caporale and Pittis, this paper finds significant evidence supporting the hypothesis of long-run equilibrium relationships between inflation rates in countries which participate in the ERM. However, the results differ in several important respects. First, the evidence rejects a dynamic...