Search Results
Journal Article
Is there a stable relationship between capacity utilization and inflation?
Many policymakers and financial market participants use the Federal Reserve's industrial capacity utilization rate as an indicator of future changes in inflation. During the past few years, however, the usefulness of the utilization rate as an inflation indicator has come under scrutiny. ; In this article, Kenneth Emery and Chih-Ping Chang examine capacity utilization's power to predict changes in inflation, with a focus on whether the relationship is stable over time. They find that while there was a positive forecasting relationship between capacity utilization and changes in consumer price ...
Journal Article
Do wages help predict inflation?
In the financial press, productivity-related wages are often cited as an inflation indicator. For example, recently slow rates of wage growth have been noted as a factor that will keep inflation rates low in the future. While inflation and wage growth do appear to be highly correlated over longer time periods, it is not clear whether movements in wage growth precede movements in inflation, thereby providing predictive content for future inflation. In this article, Kenneth Emery and Chih-Ping Chang examine the usefulness of wage growth as a predictor of inflation, as well as carry out a ...