Search Results
Briefing
What Does Sectoral Inflation Tell Us About the Aggregate Trend in Inflation?
To know the appropriate stance of monetary policy, policymakers need to determine the overall trend in inflation. This is challenging in the face of varied and evolving patterns in inflation across sectors. We describe a multisector statistical model that provides a systematic approach to appropriately weight incoming inflation data from each sector. By flexibly applying time-varying weights to different sectors, this model adjusts to changing patterns in these sectors over time — including during the pandemic — and suggests that trend inflation is lower than might be suggested by the ...
Discussion Paper
Drilling Down into Core Inflation: Goods versus Services
Among the measures of core inflation used to monitor the inflation outlook, the series excluding food and energy prices is probably the best known and most closely followed by policymakers and the public. While the conventional ?ex food and energy? measure is a composite of the price changes of a large number of different products and services, almost all models developed to explain and forecast its behavior do not distinguish between the goods and services categories. Is the distinction important? Here, we highlight the different behavior and determinants of goods inflation and services ...