This brief examines two issues of current interest concerning inflation: (1) whether "well-anchored" expectations will help to restrain inflation's decline and whether an "un-anchoring" of expectations could lead to undesirably high inflation and (2) to what extent output (or utilization) gaps...

We build a summary measure of labor market pressure that captures the common movement among a variety of labor market series. Obtained as the labor market series' first principal component, this measure explains a large portion of the variability of the underlying series. For this reason, it is...