it is expected that inflation in a country with one currency is convergent in all regions. this has been associated with “convergence” directly. in policymakers’ viewpoint, convergence is a serious topic. although the topic of inflation is investigated in macroeconomics, some inflation indexes, for instance inflation of food prices has attracted special attention. generally, the issue of food i...

I n the United States, there are two broad indexes of consumer prices: the consumer price index, or CPI, and the chain price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCEPI. Because the indexes are similar in many respects, the inflation rates measured with them often move in parallel. There are, however, some important differences, which, at times, can lead to large gaps between CPI and ...

This work proposes an alternative method for measuring monetary policy’s structural credibility under inflation targeting regimes by the main determinants of the expected inflation, and using a Kalman approach. It shows that such a method does not present some restrictions found in the existing credibility indexes, such as in Cecchetti and Krause (2002). It applies the new model and approach on...

Using a sample of commodity spot price indexes over the period 1947-2010, we examine predictability of commodity returns at the monthly, quarterly, and annual horizons. We establish out-of-sample predictability by means of variables such as bond spreads, growth in money supply and industrial production. Predictability is strongest for raw industrials and metals indexes and weakest for foods and...

Higgs inflation can occur if the Standard Model (SM) is a self-consistent effective field theory up to inflationary scale. This leads to a lower bound on the Higgs boson mass, Mh ≥ Mcrit. If Mh is more than a few hundreds of MeV above the critical value, the Higgs inflation predicts the universal values of inflationary indexes, r ' 0.003 and ns ' 0.97, independently on the Standard Model parame...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between price dispersion and inflation; we use weekly retail scanner data from 2009 to 2011 to measure price dispersion and inflation for several dairy products. We implement a linear model to investigate the linkage between price dispersion and consumer price indexes. As in the previous literature, we obtain mixed results with respect to the relati...

This lecture describes the United Kingdom’s experience with inflation targeting. It provides an historical perspective to the introduction of inflation targeting, discusses the concept of inflation targets, and compares an inflation targeting regime with money supply and exchange rate targeting regimes. It is noteworthy that inflation targeting is based on the assumption that low inflation is t...