We investigate the importance of trend inflation and the real-activity gap in explaining inflation in G7 countries since 1960. Our analysis is based on a bivariate unobserved components model of inflation and unemployment in which inflation is decomposed into a stochastic trend and a transitory component. As in recent implementations of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve, it is the transitory com...

This paper uses the European Commission’s Consumer Survey to assess whether inflation expectations have converged and whether inflation uncertainty has diminished following the introduction of the Euro in Europe. Consumers’ responses to the survey suggest that inflation expectations depend more on past national inflation rates than on the ECB’s anchor for price stability. The convergence in inf...

The fact that U.S. inflation has been remarkably low and stable over the past two decades prompts questions as to whether or not inflation persistence has changed to a lower level too. This paper employs the recently developed structural stability test with multiple regime shifts to model U.S. inflation dynamics over the past half century. Our empirical results suggest that the persistence of i...

The paper researches on the inflation level forecasting for China and the United States in one kind of univariate and three kinds of bivariate cases, using Vector Autoregressive and Bayesian Vector Autoregressive Models, based on the rolling-sample forecasts and the mean absolute percentage error standard. Empirical tests show that, both China and the United States’ inflation level series are s...

There is widespread agreement that price stability (in practice, low and stable inflation) should be an objective of monetary policy. This agreement is reflected both in the mandates set for monetary policy by governments and in the practice of central banks. Several other important questions about the objectives for monetary policy are less settled: Should there be other objectives? If there a...

An important input to monetary policymaking is estimating the current level of inflation. This paper examines empirically whether the measurement of trend inflation can be improved by using disaggregated data on sectoral inflation to construct indexes akin to core inflation but with a time-varying distributed lags of weights, where the sectoral weight depends on the timevarying volatility and p...

I reestimate a learning-from-experience model using survey reported inflation expectations and confirm that personal inflation experiences strongly predict inflation expectations. I use the model to study the effect of demographics and history on aggregate inflation expectations. Demographic shocks exert little effect on aggregate inflation expectations and population aging does not explain bet...

We propose a new approach to measuring long-run inflation risk, the inflation risk premium, and inflation expectations for the UK over the period 1985–2012. By adding long-term bond futures to the information set of inflation-indexed and nominal bonds, inflation risk is measured as an incremental time-varying covariance obtained from a trivariate GARCH model with dynamic conditional correlation...

Power hop is a “porpoising” type of pitch/bounce oscillation superimposed on the forward motion of tractors equipped with pneumatic tires. It is most often observed with tractors having two powered axles pulling towed implements in moderate to high draft field operations on dry soils. As power hop begins, the tractor exhibits gradually increasing vibration amplitudes until the operator, of nece...