On the record: The art and science of measuring inflation: a conversation with Jim Dolmas

At a time when many Americans worry about rising prices, Dallas Fed Senior Economist Jim Dolmas discusses the numbers we use to track inflation in the U.S. economy.Inflation (Finance) ; Consumer price indexes

Excluding items from personal consumption expenditures inflation

Core inflation measures constructed by excluding particularly volatile items from the price index have a long history. The most common such measures are indexes excluding the prices of food and energy items. This paper attempts to shed some statistical light on the impact of excluding certain items from the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index. In particular, I am interested in the trade-off between reducing shortrun volatility (relative to the volatility of the headline index) and possibly distorting the measurement of inflation over longer horizons. Some of the questions this paper addresses are: Which items have the highest time series volatility? Among the items with high volatility, are there meaningful patterns in the distribution of volatility across high and low frequencies? Which items, by their exclusion, have the largest impact on longer-horizon measures of inflation? And which, by their exclusion, contribute the most to reducing high-frequency volatility in measured inflation? Excluding items that answer the last question yields a PCE index which compares favorably to PCE ex food and energy along several dimensions, while excluding only half as many items by expenditure weight.Inflation (Finance) ; Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index ; Price indexes

A fitter, trimmer core inflation measure

Consumer price indexes ; Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index

What do majority-voting politics say about redistributive taxation of consumption and factor income? Not much.

Tax rates on labor income, capital income and consumption-and the redistributive transfers those taxes finance-differ widely across developed countries. Can majority-voting methods, applied to a calibrated growth model, explain that variation? The answer I fund is yes, and then some. In this paper, I examine a simple growth model, calibrated roughly to U.S. data, in which the political decision is over constant paths of taxes on factor income and consumption, used to finance a lump-sum transfer. I first look at outcomes under probabilistic voting, and find that equilibria are extremely sensitive to the specification of uncertainty. I then consider other ways to restrict the range of majority-rule outcomes, looking at the model's implications for the shape of the Pareto set and the uncovered set, and the existence or non-existence of a Condorcet winner. Solving the model on discrete grid of policy choices, I find that no Condorcet winner exists and that the Pareto and uncovered sets, while small relative to the entire issue space, are large relative to the range of tax policies we see in data for a collection of 20 OECD countries. Taking that data as the issue space, I find that none of the 20 can be ruled out on efficiency grounds, and that 10 of the 20 are in the uncovered set. Those 10 encompass policies as diverse as those of the US, Norway and Austria. One can construct a Condorcet cycle including all 10 countries' tax vectors. ; The key features of the model here, as compared to other models on the endogenous determination of taxes and redistribution, is that the issue space is multidimensional and, at the same time, no one voter type is sufficiently numerous to be decisive. I conclude that the sharp predictions of papers in this literature may not survive an expansion of their issue spaces or the allowance for a slightly less homogeneous electorate.Taxation ; Consumption (Economics) ; Income tax ; Fiscal policy

On the political economy of immigration and income redistribution

Emigration and immigration ; Income distribution

On the political economy of immigration

Emigration and immigration

Measuring core inflation: notes from a 2007 Dallas Fed conference

In May 2007, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas hosted a conference, organized with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, titled "Price Measurement for Monetary Policy." The conference broadly focused on two issues - the measurement of core inflation and the measurement of inflation expectations. This paper summarizes the conference papers on core inflation.Inflation (Finance) ; Monetary policy ; Price indexes ; Price levels

The political economy of endogenous taxation and redistribution

Taxation

Almost orthogonal outcomes under probabilistic voting: A cautionary example

I illustrate by example a way in which equilibria under probabilistic voting are fragile with respect to assumptions about the non-policy components of voter preferences. I also offer intuition for the fragility using the social welfare functions which also describe the equilibria

Almost orthogonal outcomes under probabilistic voting: A cautionary example

I illustrate by example a way in which equilibria under probabilistic voting are fragile with respect to assumptions about the non-policy components of voter preferences. I also offer intuition for the fragility using the social welfare functions which also describe the equilibria