How Well Does "Core" Inflation Capture Permanent Price Changes?

Michael Bradley (), Dennis Jansen and Tara Sinclair
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Michael Bradley: Institute for International Economic Policy, George Washington University

Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: Does excluding food and energy prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) produce a measure that captures permanent price changes? To examine this question we decompose CPI inflation and "core" inflation into their permanent and transitory components using a correlated unobserved components model. One of the key aspects of the correlated unobserved components model is that it allows shocks to the permanent component to potentially be more variable than shocks to the series itself, due to offsetting transitory shocks correlated with the permanent shocks. The stationarity of inflation may be time-varying, so we examine the performance of the core measure of inflation for periods during which it appears that inflation is I(1) and for periods during which it appears that inflation is I(0). For a period in which inflation appears to be I(1), we find that core inflation and the permanent component of overall inflation are closely related, although core inflation does have some drawbacks as a measure of permanent inflation. For a period in which inflation appears to be I(0), we decompose the core and overall price levels and find that the permanent component of core CPI is much more volatile than the actual core series and that core excludes volatile permanent shocks to the overall price level.

Keywords: Consumer Price Index; Inflation; Unobserved Components; Food and Energy Prices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 E31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mon
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: HOW WELL DOES “CORE” INFLATION CAPTURE PERMANENT PRICE CHANGES? (2015)
Working Paper: How Well Does "Core" Inflation Capture Permanent Price Changes? (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gwi:wpaper:2013-4

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