The impact of oil shocks is analyzed by estimating an augmented Phillips curve on a national, regional and city level in the United States. A significant pass-through to inflation (including all items) is recorded for all regions, while core inflation remains largely muted. The West region has experienced a much lower pass-through than other regions and a few reasons for this are; greater oil e...

From Bayesian estimates of a vector autoregression (VAR) which allows for both coefficient drift and stochastic volatility, we obtain the following three results. First, beginning in approximately 1975, the responsiveness of core inflation to changes in energy prices in the United States fell rapidly and remains muted. Second, this decline in the passthrough of energy inflation to core prices h...

This paper investigates core inflation defined as the best predictor of inflation. I compare forecasts obtained using the mean, weighted median, trimmed mean, and less food and energy inflation rates for the consumer price index and the personal consumption expenditure deflator for the current U.S. monetary policy regime. Another issue addressed is that of the systematic bias that exists due to...

This paper brings together several strands of the inflation literature. Specifically, this paper uses the forecast from a random walk model of inflation as a benchmark to test and compare the forecast performance of several alternatives including the Greenbook forecast by the Fed staff, the Survey of Professional Forecasters median forecast, lagged CPI inflation minus food and energy, lagged CP...

Evidence of smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) representations is found in two, out of three, time series of different measures of annual inflation in Colombia during this decade for monthly data. The STAR-type nonlinearities are asymmetric for inflation computed as the variation of CPI while for (a measure of ) core inflation are symmetric. Thus, LSTAR and ESTAR models were, respectively,...