Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

September 2013

Trend Inflation in Advanced Economies

Christine Garnier, Elmar Mertens, and Edward Nelson

Abstract:

We derive estimates of trend inflation for fourteen advanced economies from a framework in which trend shocks exhibit stochastic volatility. The estimated specification allows for time-variation in the degree to which longer-term inflation expectations are well anchored in each economy. Our results bring out the effect of changes in monetary regime (such as the adoption of inflation targeting in several countries) on the behavior of trend inflation. Our estimates expand on the previous literature in several dimensions: For each country, we employ a multivariate approach that pools different inflation series in order to identify their common trend. In addition, our estimates of the inflation gap--defined as the difference between trend and observed inflation--are allowed to exhibit considerable persistence. Consequently, the fluctuations in estimates of trend inflation are much lower than those reported in studies that use stochastic volatility models in which inflation gaps are serially uncorrelated. This specification also makes our estimates less sensitive than trend estimates in the literature to the effect of distortions to inflation arising from non-market influences on prices, such as tax changes. A forecast evaluation based on pseudo-real-time estimates documents improvements in inflation forecasts, even though it remains hard to outperform simple random walk forecasts to a statistically significant degree.

Keywords: Trend inflation, stochastic volatility, unobserved component models, forecasting

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