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What should core inflation exclude?

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  • Alan K. Detmeister

Abstract

Consumer price inflation excluding food and energy often performs worse than other measures of underlying inflation in out-of-sample tests of predicting future inflation or tracking an ex-post measure of underlying trend inflation. Nonetheless, inflation excluding food and energy remains popular for its simplicity and transparency. Would excluding different items improve performance while maintaining the simplicity and transparency? Unfortunately, probably not. Averaging across a series of tests suggests that knowing what items to exclude before seeing the data is problematic and excluding food and energy is not a bad ex-ante guess. However, ex-post it is not difficult to construct an index which performs considerably better than excluding food and energy.

Suggested Citation

  • Alan K. Detmeister, 2012. "What should core inflation exclude?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2012-43, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2012-43
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Riaz Riazuddin & Muhammad Amin Khan Lodhi & Muhammad Ashfaq & Behzad Ali Ahmad, 2013. "A New Measure of Core Inflation in Pakistan," SBP Working Paper Series 66, State Bank of Pakistan, Research Department.
    2. Faust, Jon & Wright, Jonathan H., 2013. "Forecasting Inflation," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2-56, Elsevier.

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