As inflation approaches zero, it becomes increasingly important to examine the price indices on which monetary policy is based. The most popularly used aggregate price statistic in the U.S. is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a statistic that appears to be a focal point in monetary policy...

The Federal Reserve System is America’s uneasy compromise between our dislike of concentrated financial power and our desire to promote efficiency in our national payments system. In fact, the Federal Reserve is the nation’s third attempt to establish a large national bank—what we now call...

An analysis concluding that inflation measures based on median price changes are a better indicator than measures based on mean price changes.

An examination of the possible impact on U.S. consumers and producers of placing an across-the-board tariff surcharge on imported goods.

A commentary on free trade and the auto industry, with a discussion of the growth of Japanese auto imports, the cost and effect of import restrictions, and the probable effects of proposed domestic content legislation.

An argument that what is essential in any arbitrary measure--including measures of value--is that they can be counted on to convey accurate and consistent information. When a central bank tolerates inflation, it reduces an economy's ability to make decisions based on value.

In this paper, we investigate the use of limited-information estimators as measures of core inflation. Employing a model of asymmetric supply disturbances, with costly price adjustment, we show how the observed skewness in the cross-sectional distribution of inflation can cause substantial noise...

Some of the items that make up the Consumer Price Index change prices frequently, while others are slow to change. We explore whether these two sets of prices - sticky and flexible - provide insight on different aspects of the inflation process. We find that sticky prices appear to incorporate...

This paper considers the evidence of “near-rationality†in household inflation expectations, as described by Akerlof, Dickens, and Perry (2000), hereafter ADP. According to ADP, the economic incentive to anticipate inflation varies from agent to agent, and as inflation falls, some...

This paper investigates the use of trimmed means as high-frequency estimators of" inflation. The known characteristics of price change distributions, specifically the observation" that they generally exhibit high levels of kurtosis, imply that simple averages of price data are" unlikely to...