Assessing the value of indicators of underlying inflation for monetary policy

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Assessing the value of indicators of underlying inflation for monetary policy

Author Info

Pietro Catte
Torsten Sløk

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Torsten Slok

Abstract

This paper considers a number of different measures of core inflation and tries to identify those containing the most useful information about future movements in headline inflation rates over the horizons relevant for monetary policy for the United States, the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada. The paper shows that the adjusted indicators do considerably better than the headline rate at determining the underlying inflation trend and, being considerably less volatile, can also be used at higher frequencies to provide more timely information. Most of these indicators also contain information relevant to predicting future headline inflation and which is additional to that contained in the headline rate. However, the relative performance of different indicators varies considerably across economies, and in some cases across sample periods. There is evidence that headline inflation tends to converge toward core inflation over time horizons of between 12 and 24 months. However, the estimated model incorporating this relationship between headline and core inflation does rather poorly in out-of-sample tests, althoughout-of-sample performance is much better for other specifications.

Evaluer l’utilité des indicateurs de l’inflation sous-jacente pour la politique monétaire
Ce document examine un certain nombre de mesures de l’inflation sous-jacente et tente d’identifier celles qui donnent les informations les plus utiles afin d’appréhender les mouvements à venir de l’inflation totale en vue de la politique monétaire pour les États-Unis, la zone euro, le Japon, le Royaume-Uni et le Canada. L’étude montre que ces indicateurs ajustés sont plus efficaces que le taux d’inflation total lorsqu’il s’agit de déterminer la tendance sous-jacente de l'inflation. De plus, étant considérablement moins volatiles, ces indicateurs peuvent aussi être utilisés à des intervalles plus courts afin d’apporter les informations les plus récentes. La plupart de ces indicateurs contiennent aussi des informations pertinentes pour prévoir les taux d’inflation futurs, et qui sont complémentaires à celles contenues dans le taux d’inflation total. Cependant, la performance relative des différents indicateurs varie énormément d’une économie à l’autre, et dans certains cas d’une période à l’autre. On observe que l’inflation totale tend à converger vers l’inflation sous-jacente à un horizon de 12 à 24 mois. Toutefois, le modèle estimé incorporant cette relation entre inflation totale et inflation sous-jacente se révèle plutôt médiocre dans des essais hors échantillon, bien que les résultats hors échantillon soient bien meilleurs dans des autres spécifications.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by OECD, Economics Department in its series OECD Economics Department Working Papers with number 461.

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Date of creation: 25 Nov 2005
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Handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:461-en

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

NEP-ALL-2005-12-09 (All new papers)
NEP-CBA-2005-12-09 (Central Banking)
NEP-MAC-2005-12-09 (Macroeconomics)
NEP-MON-2005-12-09 (Monetary Economics)

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