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Core Inflation Revisited: Forecast Accuracy across Horizons
How far out can you forecast inflation? This analysis examines the accuracy of core inflation in predicting headline inflation for periods ranging from three to 24 months in the future.
Working Paper
Is It Time to Reassess the Focal Role of Core PCE Inflation?
In this paper, I review the history of “core” PCE inflation and its rationale: remove volatile items with transitory shocks to better highlight the trend in inflation. Structural changes in the inflation process imply that, on a “reducing volatility” basis, the list of items excluded from the “core” inflation basket (aside from gasoline) is far from optimal. This is true whether one assesses volatility on the basis of a weighted component monthly, or an index monthly, or a 12-month index, or a 5-year index. In addition, I demonstrate other deficiencies of exclusion indexes. ...
Working Paper
Common and Idiosyncratic Inflation
We disentangle price changes due to economy-wide shocks from those driven by idiosyncratic shocks by estimating a two-regime dynamic factor model with dynamic loadings on a new large dataset of finely disaggregated monthly personal consumption expenditures price inflation indexes for 1959-2023. We find that up to the mid-1990s and after the Covid pandemic, common shocks were the primary driver of US inflation dynamics and had long-lasting effects. In between, idiosyncratic shocks were the main driver, and common shocks had short-lived effects.
Journal Article
Is It Time to Add Food-at-Home Inflation to Measures of Core Inflation?
Since the mid-1970s, the Federal Reserve has used core inflation to examine trends in underlying inflation. Core inflation is considered a more stable measure as it excludes energy and food, historically viewed as the most volatile components of inflation. However, core inflation can be a challenge for central bankers to communicate, as food inflation is highly salient to consumers. We argue that food-at-home inflation has become less volatile over time and could be added to measures of core inflation with few drawbacks.
Journal Article
The New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG)
A measure of underlying inflation that uses all relevant information, is available in real time, and forecasts inflation better than traditional underlying inflation measures?such as core inflation measures?would greatly benefit monetary policymakers, market participants, and the public. This article presents the New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG) for the consumer price index and the personal consumption expenditures deflator. Using a dynamic factor model approach, the UIG is derived from a broad data set that extends beyond price series to include a wide range of nominal, ...
Working Paper
The role of commodity prices in forecasting U.S. core inflation
This note documents a curious finding about the substantial forecast ability of a simple aggregator of three commodity futures prices for U.S. core inflation. The proposed aggregator reduces the out-of-sample root mean squared error for 12-month-ahead inflation forecasts of the benchmark AR(1) model by 28 percent (20 percent) for the PCE (CPI) measure of core inflation. To avoid obfuscation of the sources of forecast ability, the model is intentionally kept simple, although extensions for improving and increasing the robustness of the forecast procedure are also discussed.
Working Paper
Oil Price Pass-Through into Core Inflation
We estimate the oil price pass-through into consumer prices both in the US and in the euro area. In particular, we disentangle the specific effect that an oil price change might have on each disaggregate price, from the effect on all prices that an oil price change might have since it affects the whole economy. To do so, we first estimate a Dynamic Factor Model on a panel of disaggregate price indicators, and then we use VAR techniques to estimate the pass-through. Our results show that the oil price passes through core inflation only via its effect on the whole economy. This pass-through is ...
Using Core Inflation to Predict Headline Inflation
An analysis of CPI data suggests that a measure of inflation excluding food and energy and a measure excluding only energy are useful predictors of overall inflation 12 months in the future.
Working Paper
Core Inflation in the Advanced Economies: A Regional Perspective
We explore differences in the dynamics of core inflation between Europe and North America using a Bayesian time series filter that decomposes the level of core inflation in the major advanced economies into regional, global, and country-specific components. We find a prominent role for both regional and global factors. Historically, the two regional components have at times diverged. Using reduced-form regressions, we examine the economic drivers behind the changes in our estimated global and regional components of U.S. core inflation, focusing on the post-pandemic inflation surge and ...
Working Paper
A Broader Perspective on the Inflationary Effects of Energy Price Shocks
Consumers purchase energy in many forms. Sometimes energy goods are consumed directly, for instance, in the form of gasoline used to operate a vehicle, electricity to light a home or natural gas to heat a home. At other times, the cost of energy is embodied in the prices of goods and services that consumers buy, say when purchasing an airline ticket or when buying online garden furniture made from plastic to be delivered by mail. Previous research has focused on quantifying the pass-through of the price of crude oil or the price of motor gasoline to U.S. inflation. Neither approach accounts ...