Headline CPI Research Articles

Weighted Median Inflation Around the World: A Measure of Core Inflation

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggregation of the CPI over 1990–2021, and compares the properties of this measure to those of standard core. For quarterly data, we find that the weighted median is less volatile than standard core, more closely related to economic slack, and more closely related to headline inflation over the next year. The weighted median also has a drawback: in most countries, it has a lower average level than headline inflation. We therefore also consider a measure of core inflation that eliminates this bias, which is based on the percentile of sectoral inflation rates that matches the sample average of headline CPI inflation.

A broader perspective on the inflationary effects of energy price shocks

Consumers purchase energy in many forms. Sometimes energy goods are consumed directly, for instance, in the form of gasoline used to operate a vehicle, electricity to light a home, or natural gas to heat a home. At other times, the cost of energy is embodied in the prices of goods and services that consumers buy, say when purchasing an airline ticket or when buying online garden furniture made from plastic to be delivered by mail. Previous research has focused on quantifying the pass-through of the price of crude oil or the price of motor gasoline to U.S. inflation. Neither approach accounts for the fact that percent changes in refined product prices need not be proportionate to the percent change in the price of oil, that not all energy is derived from oil, and that the correlation of price shocks across energy markets is far from one. This paper develops a vector autoregressive model that quantifies the joint impact of shocks to several energy prices on headline and core CPI inflation. Our analysis confirms that focusing on gasoline price shocks alone will underestimate the inflationary pressures emanating from the energy sector, but not enough to overturn the conclusion that much of the observed increase in headline inflation in 2021 and 2022 reflected non-energy price shocks.

The impact of COVID-19 spread on Egyptian stock market return

The COVID-19 outbreak is considered as one of the most severe infectious viruses experienced by the world during the 21st century. This pandemic has economic, social, and psychological consequences on all countries, so the main purpose of this paper is to determine the impact of COVID-19 on the Egyptian stock return specifically as Egypt has been one of the countries that were strongly affected. The impact of COVID-19 on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX100) was investigated using a multiple regression model and historical data from 20 listed firms in the EGX100 index between February 2020 and March 2022. Additionally, we included inflation as a control variable in our model. The results indicated that COVID-19 significantly impacted the stock’s cumulative returns when used as an independent variable and measured using the cumulative coronavirus cases (CCC) and cumulative coronavirus deaths (CCD) collected for the time period of February 2020 through March 2022 from the World Health Organization (WHO) database. The findings also showed a negative correlation between these elements and the cumulative returns of the stock. Furthermore, The outcome of our model also showed that there was no significant relationship between inflation as measured by headline CPI and the stock’s cumulative returns

The Effects of Expectation Inflation on Aggregate Demand: Examining the South African Inflation Expectation Channel of South African Monetary Policy

South Africa targeted inflation since February 2000 as its monetary policy framework to ensure long-run price stability and continues to pursue a target of 3-6% for headline CPI inflation. Monetary policy emphasises the importance of promoting economic growth that can be sustained and maintenance of low inflation in an economy. Therefore, the paper seeks to check whether a relationship between economic growth (GDP) and expectation inflation exists. The autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) econometric methodology was employed to achieve the objectives. The ARDL bounds test found that there is a long-run cointegration between GDP and expectation inflation. Moreover, the ARDL results revealed that in the long run expected inflation had a negative significant effect on GDP. This implies that lower expectation inflation could stimulate economic growth. It is recommended that South Africa should continue to target inflation because its target band of 3% to 6% keep policy makers on the loop.

Forecasting inflation in Latin America with core measures

We explore the ability of core inflation to predict headline CPI annual inflation for a sample of eight developing economies in Latin America over the period January 1995–May 2017. Our in-sample and out-of-sample results are roughly consistent in providing robust evidence of predictability in four of the countries in our sample. Mixed evidence is found for the other four countries. The bulk of the out-of-sample evidence of predictability concentrates on the short horizons of one and six months. In contrast, at the longest horizon of 24 months, we only find out-of-sample evidence of predictability for two countries: Chile and Colombia, with robust results only for the latter. This is both important and challenging, given that the monetary authorities in our sample of developing countries are currently implementing or are taking steps toward the future implementation of inflation targeting regimes, which are based heavily on long-run inflation forecasts.

Disaggregated Short-Term Inflation Forecast (STIF) for Monetary Policy Decision in Sierra Leone

In this paper, the researchers have developed a short term inflation forecasting (STIF) model using Box-Jenkins time series approach (ARIMA) for analysing inflation and associated risks in Sierra Leone. The model is aided with fan charts for all thirteen components, including the Headline CPI as communication tools to inform the general public about uncertainties that surround price dynamics in Sierra Leone – this then make it possible for policy makers to utilise expert judgments in a bid to stabilize the economy. The uniqueness of this paper is its interpretation of risks to each of the disaggregated components, while also improving credibility of decisions taken by policy makers at the Bank of Sierra Leone [BSL]. Empirically, Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages, Housing and Health components indicate that shock arising from within or outside of Sierra Leone can significantly impact headline CPI, with immediate pass-through effect of high prices on consumers’ spending, at least in the short-run. The outcome of this empirical research shows uniqueness of the disaggregated model in tailoring policy makers’ attention towards targeting sector-specific policy interventions. Fan Charts produced have also highlighted degree of risks, which is based on confidence bands, which shows deviation from the baseline forecast. The ultimate goal is to improve sectoral productive capacity, while at the same time, monitoring price volatility spill-over through empirical disaggregation of the CPI basket – in association with this, outcome from the study also shows that the use of multivariate models like VAR would be welcome to monitor events on price dynamics in the national economy.

Forecasting Inflation in Latin America with Core Measures

We explore the ability of core inflation to predict headline CPI annual inflation for a sample of 8 developing economies in Latin America during the period January 1995-May 2017. Our in-sample and out-of-sample results are roughly consistent in providing evidence of predictability in the great majority of our countries, although, as usual, a slightly stronger evidence of predictability comes from the in-sample analysis. The bulk of the out-of-sample evidence of predictability concentrates at the short horizons of 1 and 6 months. In contrast, at longer horizons of 12 and 24 months, we only find evidence of predictability for two countries: Chile and Colombia. This is both important and challenging, given that monetary authorities in our sample of developing countries are currently implementing or given steps toward the future implementation of inflation targeting regimes, which are heavily based on long run inflation forecasts.

Exploring the Nexus between Inflation and Globalization Under Inflation Targeting Through the Lens of New Zealand's Experience

We investigate empirically the inflation dynamics in New Zealand, a small open economy and a pioneer in inflation targeting, under various open-economy Phillips curve specifications. Our forecasting exercise suggests that open-economy Phillips curves under standard measures of global slack do not help forecast domestic inflation, possibly indicating measurement problems with global slack itself. In turn, under a stable inflation target we still find that (i) global inflation and (ii) global inflation and oil prices have information content for headline CPI and core CPI inflation over the 1997:Q3-2015:Q1 period and appear to be reliable proxies for global slack in forecasting inflation.

Exploring the Nexus Between Inflation and Globalization Under Inflation Targeting Through the Lens of New Zealand’s Experience

We investigate empirically the inflation dynamics in New Zealand, a small open economy and a pioneer in inflation targeting, under various open-economy Phillips curve specifications. Our forecasting exercise suggests that open-economy Phillips curves under standard measures of global slack do not help forecast domestic inflation, possibly indicating measurement problems with global slack itself. In turn, under a stable inflation target we still find that (i) global inflation or (ii) global inflation or oil prices have information content for headline CPI and core CPI inflation over the 1997:Q3-2015:Q1 period and appear to be reliable proxies for global slack in forecasting inflation.

Revisiting Inflation and Individual Equities

This paper reexamines the inflation-hedging properties of individual equities. When determining inflation betas for individual equities we use multivariate regressions, which utilize all available data and account for equity market factor and reporting lags in inflation indices. We show how such an approach can even be used to create inflation-sensitive strategies for customized inflation indices. The facet of customization is necessary since different kinds of inflation impact different investors. For example, in retirement an investor is more concerned about medical expenses. We illustrate strategies for the US headline CPI, Forbes Cost of Living Extremely Well Index (CLEWI), and the US Medical Care Price Index. When constructing inflation-sensitive portfolios, besides using equally weighting scheme, we show how alternative weighting schemes can be used alongside the choice of inflation sensitive equities to accentuate inflation sensitivity, by using maximum beta optimization or to manage equity risk exposure — low volatility and equity beta as result of using minimum volatility optimization.

The Evasive Predictive Ability of Core Inflation

We explore the ability of traditional core inflation – consumer prices excluding food and energy – to predict headline CPI annual inflation. We analyze a sample of OECD and non-OECD economies using monthly data from January 1994 to March 2015. Our results indicate that sizable predictability emerges for a small subset of countries. For the rest of our economies predictability is either subtle or undetectable. These results hold true even when implementing an out-of-sample test of Granger causality especially designed to compare forecasts from nested models. Our findings partially challenge the common wisdom about the ability of core inflation to forecast headline inflation, and suggest a careful weighting of the traditional exclusion of food and energy prices when assessing the size of the monetary stimulus.

Are gold and silver a hedge against inflation? A two century perspective

This study examines the long-run hedging ability of gold and silver prices against alternative measures of consumer price index for the UK and the US. We employ a dataset that spans from 1791 to 2010, and both a time-invariant and a time-varying cointegration framework. We find that gold can at least fully hedge headline, expected and core CPI in the long-run. This ability tends to be stronger when we allow for the long term dynamics to vary over time. The inflation hedging ability of gold is on average higher in the US compared to the UK. Silver does not hedge US consumer prices albeit evidence emerges in favor of a time-varying long-run relationship in the UK.

A New Database of Global Economic Indicators

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas aims to standardize and disseminate economic indicators for policy analysis and scholarly work on the role of globalization. Its main purpose is to offer a broad perspective on a number of global factors affecting the U.S. economy. DGEI indicators are based on a core sample of 40 countries with aggregates for the rest of the world (ex. the U.S.) and by level of development attainment and openness to trade. DGEI indicators currently include real GDP, industrial production (IP), Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), merchandise exports and imports, headline CPI, core CPI (ex. food and energy), PPI/WPI inflation, nominal and real exchange rates, and short-term interest rates. Here we describe our methodology to transform and combine different time series, for temporal and cross-country aggregation, and to highlight the importance of using representative data in international macroeconomics research. Our paper makes a related contribution to the literature by providing a formal assessment of conventional interpolation methods used to adjust the data frequency. A selection of the DGEI-derived global indicators – to be updated monthly – can be accessed at the following URL: http://www.dallasfed.org/institute/dgei/index.cfm.

Exchange Rate Regimes and Persistence of Inflation in Thailand

This study explored the degree of inflation persistence in Thailand using both monthly headline and sectoral CPI indices during the 1985-2012 period. The results showed that the degree of inflation persistence for the headline inflation did not exist under the fixed exchange rate regime, even though some sectoral inflation series exhibited persistence. Under the floating regime, the headline inflation persistence was low, but various sectoral inflation rates showed low to moderate persistence. Therefore, inflation persistence for the entire sample period was caused by the switch from fixed to floating regime. Furthermore, there seemed to be no monetary accommodation of inflation persistence under the floating regime. Based upon the results from this study, inflation targeting implemented in May 2000 to combat inflation might not fully reduce inflation to the target of price stability.

Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI): A Methodological Note

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is aimed at standardizing and disseminating world economic indicators for policy analysis and scholarly work on the role of globalization. The purpose of DGEI is to offer a broad perspective on how economic developments around the world influence the U.S. economy with a wide selection of indicators. DGEI is automated within an Excel-VBA and E-views framework for the processing and aggregation of multiple country time series. It includes a core sample of 40 countries with available indicators and broad coverage. Country groupings include rest of the world (ex. the U.S.) aggregates and subgroups of countries by development attainment and trade openness. The indicators currently tracked include real GDP, industrial production (IP), Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), merchandise exports and imports, headline CPI, CPI (ex. food and energy), PPI/WPI inflation, nominal and real exchange rates, official/policy interest rates, and long-term interest rates. All series are monthly, with the exception of real GDP which is reported at a quarterly frequency. Aggregation is based on trade shares with the U.S. The Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute publishes the aggregate indicators as well as additional country detail on its website with an accompanying slideshow on Global Economic Conditions. This note provides a technical description of the methodology implemented to construct the DGEI.

A Contribution to the Chronology of Turning Points in Global Economic Activity (1980-2012)

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is aimed at standardizing and disseminating world economic indicators for the study of globalization. It includes a core sample of 40 countries with available indicators and broad coverage for quarterly real GDP, and the monthly series of industrial production (IP), Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), merchandise exports and imports, headline CPI, CPI (ex. food and energy), PPI/WPI inflation, nominal and real exchange rates, and official/policy interest rates (see Grossman, Mack, and Martinez-Garcia (2013)). This paper aims to codify in a systematic way the chronology of global business cycles for DGEI. We propose a novel chronology based on IP data for a sample of 84 countries at a monthly frequency from 1980 until now, and assess the turning points obtained as a signal of the underlying state of the economy as tracked by the indicators of DGEI. We conclude by proposing and also evaluating global recession probability forecasts up to 12 months ahead. The logit model proposed uses the DGEI aggregate indicators to offer advanced warning of turning point in the global cycle—by this metric a global downturn in 2013 does not appear likely.

A Contribution to the Chronology of Turning Points in Global Economic Activity (1980-2012)

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is aimed at standardizing and disseminating world economic indicators for the study of globalization. It includes a core sample of 40 countries with available indicators and broad coverage for quarterly real GDP, and the monthly series of industrial production (IP), Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), merchandise exports and imports, headline CPI, CPI (ex. food and energy), PPI/WPI inflation, nominal and real exchange rates, and official/policy interest rates (see Grossman, Mack, and Martinez-Garcia (2013)). This paper aims to codify in a systematic way the chronology of global business cycles for DGEI. We propose a novel chronology based on IP data for a sample of 84 countries at a monthly frequency from 1980 until now, and assess the turning points obtained as a signal of the underlying state of the economy as tracked by the indicators of DGEI. We conclude by proposing and also evaluating global recession probability forecasts up to 12 months ahead. The logit model proposed uses the DGEI aggregate indicators to offer advanced warning of turning point in the global cycle — by this metric a global downturn in 2013 does not appear likely.

Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI): A Methodological Note

The Database of Global Economic Indicators (DGEI) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is aimed at standardizing and disseminating world economic indicators for policy analysis and scholarly work on the role of globalization. The purpose of DGEI is to offer a broad perspective on how economic developments around the world influence the U.S. economy with a wide selection of indicators. DGEI is automated within an Excel-VBA and E-views framework for the processing and aggregation of multiple country time series. It includes a core sample of 40 countries with available indicators and broad coverage. Country groupings include rest of the world (ex. the U.S.) aggregates and subgroups of countries by development attainment and trade openness. The indicators currently tracked include real GDP, industrial production (IP), Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI), merchandise exports and imports, headline CPI, CPI (ex. food and energy), PPI/WPI inflation, nominal and real exchange rates, and official/policy interest rates. All series are monthly, with the exception of real GDP which is reported at a quarterly frequency. Aggregation is based on trade shares with the U.S. The Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute publishes the aggregate indicators as well as additional country detail on its website with an accompanying slideshow on Global Economic Conditions. This note provides a technical description of the methodology implemented to construct the DGEI.

World Food Prices, the Terms of Trade-Real Exchange Rate Nexus, and Monetary Policy

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange rate and the terms of trade can move in opposite directions in response to world food price shocks. This exacerbates the policy trade-off between stabilizing output prices vis a vis the real exchange rate, to an extent that depends on risk sharing and the price elasticity of exports. Under perfect risk sharing, targeting the headline CPI welfare-dominates targeting the PPI if the variance of food price shocks is not too small and the export price elasticity is realistically high. In such a case, however, targeting forecast CPI is a superior choice. With incomplete risk sharing, PPI targeting is clearly a winner.

World Food Prices, the Terms of Trade-Real Exchange Rate Nexus, and Monetary Policy

How should monetary policy respond to large fluctuations in world food prices? We study this question in an open economy model in which imported food has a larger weight in domestic consumption than abroad and international risk sharing can be imperfect. A key novelty is that the real exchange rate and the terms of trade can move in opposite directions in response to world food price shocks. This exacerbates the policy trade-off between stabilizing output prices vis a vis the real exchange rate, to an extent that depends on risk sharing and the price elasticity of exports. Under perfect risk sharing, targeting the headline CPI welfare-dominates targeting the PPI if the variance of food price shocks is not too small and the export price elasticity is realistically high. In such a case, however, targeting forecast CPI is a superior choice. With incomplete risk sharing, PPI targeting is clearly a winner.