Residual Seasonality in Five Measures of PCE Inflation

Kurt Lunsford

Economic Commentary, 2025, vol. 2025, issue 03, 6

Abstract: I document residual seasonality in five measures of PCE inflation: headline, core, market-based core, median, and trimmed mean. While these measures are all computed from seasonally adjusted data, I show that each of these measures has had low average monthly inflation in November and December and high average monthly inflation in January from 1987 through the beginning of 2025. The difference in inflation rates from November and December to January is economically and statistically significant. This timing for residual seasonality often gives the impression that monthly inflation is low at the end of the calendar year and jumps to start the year.

Keywords: Inflation; PCE inflation; residual seasonality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-ec-202503 Persistent link with full text (text/html)
https://www.clevelandfed.org/-/media/project/cleve ... flation/ec202503.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcec:99732

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.26509/frbc-ec-202503

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Commentary from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().