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Report
The Distribution of Sectoral Price Changes and Recent Inflation Developments
Inflation has declined across many sectors so far in 2023, but the distribution of sectoral price changes still shows atypical features, such as bimodality in which substantial masses of sectors record price changes both below and above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent inflation target. Such bimodality was not typical before the pandemic, suggesting that sector-specific price adjustments are now playing a more important role in inflation developments. The recent slowdown in inflation was partly caused by a larger-than-normal share of the consumption basket being located in the left tail of ...
Working Paper
Unit Cost Expectations and Uncertainty: Firms' Perspectives on Inflation
We rely on the Atlanta Fed's Business Inflation Expectations survey to draw inference about firms' inflation perceptions, expectations, and uncertainty through the lens of firms' unit (marginal) costs. Using methods grounded in the survey literature, we find evidence that the concept of "aggregate inflation" as measured through price statistics like the consumer price index hold very little relevance for business decision makers. This lack of relevance manifests itself through experiments (including randomized controlled trials) that show how researchers word questions to elicit inflation ...