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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
Two Measures of Core Inflation: A Comparison
Trimmed-mean Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) inflation does not clearly dominate ex-food-and-energy PCE inflation in real-time forecasting of headline PCE inflation. However, trimmed-mean inflation is the superior communications and policy tool because it is a less-biased real-time estimator of headline inflation and because it more successfully filters out headline inflation?s transitory variation, leaving only cyclical and trend components.