A Comparison of Measures of Core Inflation

[...]This article provides a systematic evaluation of severalproposed measures of U.S. core inflation: the popular ex foodand energy series, an ex energy series, a weighted median series,and an exponentially smoothed series. To inform the currentdebate on this issue, we adopt a general framework for theanalysis. Regarding the choice of aggregate price indexes, wefocus on inflation measures that are likely goals for U.S.monetary policy, namely the consumer price index (CPI) andthe personal consumption expenditure (PCE) index. Toevaluate the core measures of inflation, we select criteria thathave been used in previous studies: ease of design, a similarmean to the goal inflation series, and an ability to track thetrend in the goal inflation series.[...]