IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/11019.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Inflation Indicators and Inflation Policy

In: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1995, Volume 10

Author

Listed:
  • Stephen G. Cecchetti

Abstract

In recent years, central bankers throughout the world have advocated that monetary policy shift toward inflation targeting. Recent actions in the U.S. serve to highlight the desire of the Federal Reserve to keep inflation both low and stable, while downplaying the likely output and employment consequences. But control of inflation requires both that one be able to forecast the future path of the price level and that one have estimates of what impact policy changes have on that path. Unfortunately, inflation is very difficult to forecast at even very near horizons. This is true because the relationship of candidate inflation indicators to inflation is neither very strong nor very stable. Beyond this, the relationship between monetary policy instruments, such as the Federal Funds Rate, and inflation also varies substantially over time and cannot be estimated precisely. Construction of policy rules can take these difficulties into account. Several rules are examined, and they have the following interesting properties. First, since prices take time to respond to all types of impulses, the object of price stability implies raising the Federal Funds Rate immediately following a shock, rather than waiting for prices to rise before acting. Finally, comparison of the results of price level targeting with nominal income targeting suggests that the difficulties inherent in forecasting and controlling the former provide an argument for focusing on the latter.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Stephen G. Cecchetti, 1995. "Inflation Indicators and Inflation Policy," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1995, Volume 10, pages 189-236, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:11019
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c11019.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Christiano, Lawrence J & Eichenbaum, Martin & Evans, Charles, 1996. "The Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks: Evidence from the Flow of Funds," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 78(1), pages 16-34, February.
    2. Robert E. Hall & N. Gregory Mankiw, 1994. "Nominal Income Targeting," NBER Chapters, in: Monetary Policy, pages 71-94, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Michael F. Bryan & Stephen G. Cecchetti, 1994. "Measuring Core Inflation," NBER Chapters, in: Monetary Policy, pages 195-219, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Hansen, Bruce E, 1997. "Approximate Asymptotic P Values for Structural-Change Tests," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 15(1), pages 60-67, January.
    5. Hallman, Jeffrey J & Porter, Richard D & Small, David H, 1991. "Is the Price Level Tied to the M2 Monetary Aggregate in the Long Run?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(4), pages 841-858, September.
    6. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    7. Martin Feldstein & James H. Stock, 1994. "The Use of a Monetary Aggregate to Target Nominal GDP," NBER Chapters, in: Monetary Policy, pages 7-69, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Caskey, John P, 1985. "Modeling the Formation of Price Expectations: A Bayesian Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(4), pages 768-776, September.
    9. Steven Strongin, 1992. "The identification of monetary policy disturbances: explaining the liquidity puzzle," Working Paper Series, Macroeconomic Issues 92-27, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    10. Michael Woodford, 1994. "Nonstandard Indicators for Monetary Policy: Can Their Usefulness Be Judged from Forecasting Regressions?," NBER Chapters, in: Monetary Policy, pages 95-115, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & Charles Evans, 1994. "The Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks: Some Evidence from the Flow of Funds," NBER Working Papers 4699, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Sims, Christopher A, 1972. "Money, Income, and Causality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 540-552, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Uhlig, Harald, 2005. "What are the effects of monetary policy on output? Results from an agnostic identification procedure," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(2), pages 381-419, March.
    2. Svensson, Lars E. O., 1999. "Inflation targeting as a monetary policy rule," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(3), pages 607-654, June.
    3. Lastrapes, William D. & Selgin, George, 1995. "The liquidity effect: Identifying short-run interest rate dynamics using long-run restrictions," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 387-404.
    4. Laurence Ball, 1999. "Efficient Rules for Monetary Policy," International Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 2(1), pages 63-83, April.
    5. Stock, James H. & Watson, Mark W., 1999. "Business cycle fluctuations in us macroeconomic time series," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 1, pages 3-64, Elsevier.
    6. El-Shagi, Makram & Giesen, Sebastian & Kelly, Logan J., 2015. "The Quantity Theory Revisited: A New Structural Approach," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 19(1), pages 58-78, January.
    7. Shen, Chung-Hua & Chiang, Thomas Chi-Nan, 1999. "Retrieving the vanishing liquidity effect--a threshold vector autoregressive model," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 259-277, May.
    8. Uhlig, H.F.H.V.S., 1999. "What are the Effects of Monetary Policy on Output? Results from an Agnostic Identification Procedure," Other publications TiSEM 2e0fa8dd-ead5-4c6b-97cb-1, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    9. Cushman, David O. & Zha, Tao, 1997. "Identifying monetary policy in a small open economy under flexible exchange rates," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 433-448, August.
    10. Guirguis, Hany S., 1999. "Properly estimating the liquidity effect: why accounting for stationarity and outliers is important," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 51(4), pages 303-314, July.
    11. Mau-Ting Lin, 2004. "Measuring the effect of money: test, estimation and identification," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2003 53, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    12. Cochrane, John H., 1998. "What do the VARs mean? Measuring the output effects of monetary policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 277-300, April.
    13. Ben Fung & Rohit Gupta, "undated". "Searching for the Liquidity Effect in Canada," Staff Working Papers 94-12, Bank of Canada.
    14. Al-Sharkas, A.A. & Lozi, B.M., 2009. "Effects of Measurement on Inferences: An Application to Money Demand and Related Variables in the United States," Applied Econometrics and International Development, Euro-American Association of Economic Development, vol. 9(1).
    15. Stephen G. Cecchetti, 1997. "Central Bank Policy Rules: Conceptual Issues and Practical Considerations," NBER Working Papers 6306, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Benjamin M. Friedman, 1995. "Does Monetary Policy Affect Real Economic Activity?: Why Do We Still Ask This Question?," NBER Working Papers 5212, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Söderlind, Paul, 1995. "Forward Interest Rates as Indicators of Inflation Expectations," CEPR Discussion Papers 1313, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    18. Virginie Coudert & Benoît Mojon, 1997. "Asymétries financières et transmission de la politique monétaire en Europe," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 128(2), pages 41-60.
    19. Todd E. Clark & Michael W. McCracken, 2010. "Averaging forecasts from VARs with uncertain instabilities," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(1), pages 5-29, January.
    20. Coenen, Gunter & Wieland, Volker, 2005. "A small estimated euro area model with rational expectations and nominal rigidities," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 49(5), pages 1081-1104, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • E37 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberch:11019. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.