Search Results
Showing results 1 to 2 of approximately 2.
(refine search)
Discussion Paper
Is U.S. Monetary Policy Seasonal?
Many economic time series display periodic and predictable patterns within each calendar year, generally referred to as seasonal effects. For example, retail sales tend to be higher in December than in other months. These patterns are well-known to economists, who apply statistical filters to remove seasonal effects so that the resulting series are more easily comparable across months. Because policy decisions are based on seasonally adjusted series, we wouldn’t expect the decisions to exhibit any seasonal behavior. Yet, in this post we find that the Federal Reserve has been much more ...
Briefing
Residual Seasonality in Monthly Core Inflation
At the end of 2023, three-month average core CPI inflation came in at 3.6 percent annualized. However, January and February 2024 core CPI inflation came in at 4.8 percent annualized. Given the volatility in monthly inflation numbers, one should not take too much signal from one or two months of data. Furthermore, the possibility has been raised that there is a regular but transient inflation uptick early in the year, even in seasonally adjusted data. In this article, I show that, for the last 20 years, there is no statistical evidence for this kind of residual seasonality in monthly core CPI ...