Measuring US core inflation: A common trends approach

In this paper the long-run trend in CPI inflation (core inflation) for the US over the 19602000 period is estimated using a common trends model. In this framework, core inflation is interpreted and constructed as the long-run forecast of inflation conditional on the information contained in nominal money growth, output fluctuations and movements in the oil price. Unlike other commonly used measures of core inflation, the common-trends core inflation rate exploits the long-run link between inflation and monetary growth, a strong feature of the data. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.