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Working Paper
The roles of inflation expectations, core inflation, and slack in real-time inflation forecasting
Using state-space modeling, we extract information from surveys of long-term inflation expectations and multiple quarterly inflation series to undertake a real-time decomposition of quarterly headline PCE and GDP-deflator inflation rates into a common long-term trend, common cyclical component, and high-frequency noise components. We then explore alternative approaches to real-time forecasting of headline PCE inflation. We find that performance is enhanced if forecasting equations are estimated using inflation data that have been stripped of high-frequency noise. Performance can be further ...
Journal Article
What’s the Best Measure of Economic Slack?
Different ways of measuring the economy’s unused capacity, or slack, can result in varying inflation forecasts. Estimates suggest that direct measures of labor market tightness, such as the ratio of job vacancies to unemployment or the rate of employee job switching, provide more accurate forecasts than commonly used measures, such as the unemployment rate or the output gap. Recent elevated values of these measures of labor market tightness suggest greater inflation pressure than is implied by the unemployment rate alone.
Working Paper
The Death of the Phillips Curve?
Are inflation dynamics well captured by Phillips Curve models, or has this framework become less relevant over time? The evidence for the U.S. suggests that the slopes of the price and wage Phillips Curves? the short-run inflation-unemployment trade-offs ? are low and have got a little flatter. For example, the recursive estimate of the unemployment coefficient in the core PCE Phillips Curve has fallen a little from -0.09 to -0.07 since the Great Recession. However, the decline is not statistically significant. Dynamic forecasts from the wage and price Phillips Curves estimated using data ...
Discussion Paper
The Long-Term Unemployed and the Wages of New Hires
This is the third in a series of blog posts on the topic of measuring labor market slack. In this post, we assess the relationships between short- and long-term unemployment and wages by comparing the differences in states’ experiences over the business cycle. While all states felt the impact of the Great Recession, some fared better than others. Consequently, it is possible to use differences in the composition and shifts of short- and long-term unemployment to determine whether short-term unemployment exerts a greater influence on wage determination. The results suggest that there is ...