Working Paper: NBER ID: w29609
Authors: Laurence M. Ball; Daniel Leigh; Prachi Mishra; Antonio Spilimbergo
Abstract: Large price changes in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have caused erratic fluctuations in the U.S. headline inflation rate. This paper compares alternative approaches to filtering out the transitory effects of these industry price changes and measuring the underlying or core level of inflation over 2020-2021. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of core, the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices, has performed poorly: over most of 2020-21, it is almost as volatile as headline inflation. Measures of core that exclude a fixed set of additional industries, such as the Atlanta Fed’s sticky-price inflation rate, have been less volatile, but the least volatile have been measures that filter out large price changes in any industry, such as the Cleveland Fed’s median inflation rate and the Dallas Fed’s trimmed mean inflation rate. These core measures have followed smooth paths, drifting down when the economy was weak in 2020 and then rising as the economy has rebounded.
Keywords: core inflation; COVID-19; economic slack; inflation measurement
JEL Codes: E31; E58
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| traditional core inflation measure excluding food and energy (xfe) (E31) | volatility (E32) |
| broader exclusions (G52) | lower volatility (G19) |
| Cleveland Fed's weighted median and Dallas Fed's trimmed mean (E39) | stability during economic disruption (E32) |
| Cleveland Fed's weighted median and Dallas Fed's trimmed mean (E39) | adapt better to extreme price movements (G13) |
| outlier exclusion measures drift down as economic slack increases (E39) | support Phillips curve relationship (E31) |