Inflation in emerging markets is often driven by large, persistent changes in food and energy prices. Core inflation measures that neglect or under-weight volatile CPI subcomponents such as food and energy risk excluding information helpful in assessing current and future inflation trends. This...

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...

The treatment of owner-occupied housing (OOH) is probably the most important unresolved issue in inflation measurement. The European Union has been grappling with this problem for over a decade. We argue for measuring OOH costs using a particular version of the user cost method. We then compare...

The headline consumer price index (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 paper...

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...

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...

The Consumer Price Index is a Laspeyres index which uses a plutocratic method. This paper has three purposes. The first purpose is to assemble a democratic CPI. The second purpose is to construct an alternative one using the median of the expenditure distribution. The third purpose is to compile...

This paper examines the extent to which digitalization-measured by a new proxy based on IP addresses allocations per country-has influenced inflation dynamics in a sample of 36 advanced and emerging economies over 2000-2017. Phillips curve estimates show that digitalization has a statistically...

We study the transmission of monetary shocks across euro-area countries using a dynamic factor model and high-frequency identification. We develop a methodology to assess the degree of heterogeneity, which we find to be low in financial variables and output, but significant in consumption,...

This paper discusses and analyzes the case of Egypt in recent time periods since the turn of the new millennium in combating inflation. The results show that sources of inflation include cost-push, demand-pull, power pricing, and imported inflation. The overall significance of the anti-inflation...