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Briefing
Relative Price Changes Are Unlikely to Account for Recent High Inflation
March 2021 marked the first month of the ongoing high inflation episode in the U.S. Last September, I analyzed the first five months of this episode through the lens of the distribution of price changes for all PCE components. A small fraction of expenditures accounted for much of the high inflation in those months. In this Economic Brief, I provide a related analysis and incorporate a new summary statistic for the distribution of relative price changes. In the last four months, high inflation has not been concentrated in a small fraction of expenditures, deviating from the relationship we ...
Journal Article
Trend inflation, firm-specific capital, and sticky prices
Briefing
A Small Contribution to Measuring the Lags in Monetary Policy Transmission
From May 2022 to July 2023, holdings of small CDs have risen from virtually nothing to more than $900 billion. While this is a dramatic increase, it has come on the heels of a sharp increase in interest rates, and the increase in CDs did not begin until well after interest rates started rising. In this article, I provide some historical perspective for the recent increase in CDs and retail money market mutual fund (MMMF) balances. What is the typical lag between market interest rate increases and increases in CD and MMMF balances? Is the recent increase unusually large, or does history ...
Working Paper
Payment Choice and the Future of Currency: Insights from Two Billion Retail Transactions
This paper uses transaction-level data from a large discount chain together with zip-code-level explanatory variables to learn about consumer payment choices across size of transaction, location, and time. With three years of data from thousands of stores across the country, we identify important economic and demographic effects; weekly, monthly, and seasonal cycles in payments, as well as time trends and significant state-level variation that is not accounted for by the explanatory variables. We use the estimated model to forecast how the mix of consumer payments will evolve and to forecast ...
Journal Article
Relative Price Changes and the Optimal Inflation Rate
Relative prices of some goods or sectors have long-run trends: For example, the price of services relative to goods has been rising fairly steadily for decades. Other relative prices do not have long-run trends but sometimes fluctuate dramatically from one period to the next. How should monetary policy behave in the face of these trends and fluctuations? I use a model with costly price adjustment to study the optimal rate of inflation when there are trends in relative prices and to construct hypothetical U.S. inflation rates that would have minimized the costs of price adjustment implied by ...
Journal Article
K-core inflation
K-core inflation is a new class of underlying inflation measures. The two most popular measures of underlying inflation are core inflation and trimmed mean inflation. The former removes fixed categories of goods and services (food and energy) from the inflation calculation, and the latter removes fixed percentiles of the weighted distribution of price changes. In contrast, k-core inflation specifies a size of relative price change to be removed from the inflation calculation. Thus, the categories and percentiles to be removed vary with each period?s distribution of relative price changes.
Journal Article
Boom and bust in telecommunications
Conference Paper
Inflation targeting in a St. Louis model of the 21st century
Journal Article
Zero inflation and the Friedman rule: a welfare comparison