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Working Paper
Rising Market Concentration and the Decline of Food Price Shock Pass-Through to Core Inflation
Using a vector autoregression that allows for time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, we show that U.S. core inflation became 75 percent less responsive to shocks in food prices since the late 1970s. The decline in the pass-through of food price shocks to inflation is a result of a decline in both volatility and the persistence of food price changes in inflation. This decline in pass-through coincides with a period of increasing concentration in the food supply chain, especially among U.S. grocery retailers and distributors. We find that 60 percent of the variation in pass-through ...