Measuring core inflation in Italy comparing aggregate vs. disaggregate price data

Abstract

This paper focuses on the core inflation measurement in Italy using univariate (national-level inflation) vs. multivariate (city-level inflation) models during the period 1970–2006. We derive algebraic expressions that allow comparison between the reduced form parameters of univariate and multivariate local level models in the context of contemporaneous and temporal aggregation. We illustrate the relevance of these theoretical results for the empirical analysis of time series. Using Italian data, we find that multivariate and univariate models extract similar core inflation measures when analyzing the moderate-low inflation period. In contrast, the two competing models yield different trends when modeling the Great Inflation period.