Many economists expect inflation to rise in 1995. These expectations are based on various approaches to forecasting inflation. One approach is based on the standard economic theory that inflation rises when slack is eliminated from the economy and production exceeds capacity constraints. According to this view, measures of economic slack such as unemployment and capacity utilization provide use...

nterest in commodity prices as indicators of consumer price inflation has ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall in commodity prices themselves. True to form, as commodity prices have surged in the last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictive power has returned. Inflation hawks point to an outpouring of studies in the late 1980s showing a strong empirical connection between commodity...

In this paper, we empirically examine the effect of inflation targeting on the exchange rate pass-through to prices in emerging countries. We use a panel VAR that allows us to use the larger data set on twenty-seven emerging countries (fifteen inflation targeters and twelve inflation nontargeters). Our evidence suggests that inflation targeting in emerging countries has helped to reduce the pas...

An important input to monetary policymaking is estimating the current level of inflation. This paper examines empirically whether the measurement of trend inflation can be improved by using disaggregated data on sectoral inflation to construct indexes akin to core inflation but with a time-varying distributed lags of weights, where the sectoral weight depends on the timevarying volatility and p...

This paper compares the different dynamics of the simple sum monetary aggregates and the Divisia monetary aggregate indexes over time, over the business cycle, and across high and low inflation and interest rate phases. Although traditional comparisons of the series sometimes suggest that simple sum and Divisia monetary aggregates share similar dynamics, there are important differences during c...

This paper develops and applies a method for producing constant quality rent indexes and inflation estimates for different segments of the rental housing stock. In each of the five contrasting metropolitan areas, rent inflation since the late 1980s is found to have varied by market segment. In some metro areas, rental prices have risen most rapidly in the bottom third of the rent distribution, ...

The first exercise uses a different approach to impute missing values within price series. The method used in the paper is to fill missing prices with the last available price for each product. This approach is reasonable because the gaps in the online data last only a few days. However, official statistical offices deal with missing values in their monthly series in different ways. The standar...

The medical-care sector often experiences changes in medical protocols and technologies that cause shifts in treatments. However, the commonly used medical-care price indexes reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics hold the mix of medical services fixed. In contrast, episode expenditure indexes, advocated by many health economists, track the full cost of disease treatment, even as treatments...