Recent work suggests VAR models of output, inflation, and interest rates may be prone to instabilities. In the face of such instabilities, a variety of estimation or forecasting methods might be used to improve the accuracy of forecasts from a VAR. The uncertainty inherent in any single...

From 1975 to 1980, inflation in core (nonfood and nonenergy) consumer prices rose sharply as crude oil prices more than tripled. Yet, as crude oil prices quadrupled from late 2001 to 2007, core consumer price inflation remained essentially flat. Some observers have attributed the stability of...

Although many policymakers and analysts associate “core CPI inflation” with the CPI excluding food and energy, there are other measures of core consumer price inflation. Like the CPI excluding food and energy, these other measures typically attempt to identify the underlying trend in CPI...

The primary goal of Federal Reserve monetary policy is to foster maximum long-term growth in the U.S. economy by achieving price stability over time. Price stability will be achieved, according to some definitions, when inflation ceases to be a factor in the decision-making processes of...

In setting monetary policy in 1995, the Federal Reserve sought to promote sustainable economic growth and continued progress toward price stability. Toward those ends, the Federal Reserve adjusted the stance of monetary policy three times in 1995. In February, amid signs of increasing...

From early 1994 to early 1995, inflation surged in the producer price indexes for crude materials and intermediate goods. For example, inflation in intermediate goods prices rose from 2.6 percent annually in the first half of 1994 to 7.1 percent over the next nine months. At the same time,...

This paper evaluates potential explanations for the sometimes poor forecasting performance of the Phillips curve. One explanation is that out-of-sample metrics are noisy or, equivalently, have relatively low power. Another potential explanation is instability in the coefficients of the model. To...

Ashley, Granger, and Schmalensee (1980) and Diebold and Mariano (1995) suggest that forecast comparisons may be used to examine Granger causality. According to Ashley et al., if forecasts of y based on a VAR model in x and y are superior to those based on an AR model for y , then x carries...

We consider using out of sample mean squared prediction errors (MSPEs) to evaluate the null that a given series follows a zero mean martingale difference against the alternative that it is linearly predictable. Under the null of zero predictability, the population MSPE of the null “no...