Discussion Paper
Creating a History of U.S. Inflation Expectations
Middeldorp, Menno; Groen, Jan J. J. (2013-08-21)
Central bankers closely monitor inflation expectations because they?re an important determinant of actual inflation. Treasury inflation-protected securities (TIPS) are commonly used to measure bond market inflation expectations. Unfortunately, they were only introduced in 1997, so historical data are limited. We propose a solution to this problem by using the relationship between TIPS yields and other data with a longer history to construct synthetic TIPS rates going back to 1971.
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20130821

Discussion Paper
How Easy Is It to Forecast Commodity Prices?
Groen, Jan J. J.; Pesenti, Paolo (2011-06-27)
Over the last decade, unprecedented spikes and drops in commodity prices have been a recurrent source of concern to both policymakers and the general public. Given all the recent attention, have economists and analysts made any progress in their ability to predict movements in commodity prices? In this post, we find there is no easy answer. We consider different strategies to forecast near-term commodity price inflation, but find that no particular approach is systematically more accurate and robust. Additionally, the results warn against interpreting current forecasts of commodity prices ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20110627