Global inflation has surged to 7.5 percent in August 2022, from an average of 2.1 percent in the decade preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, threatening to become an entrenched phenomenon. This paper disentangles the confluence of contributing factors to the post-pandemic rise in consumer price...

In 2021-22, inflation in Europe soared to multidecade highs, consistently exceeding policymakers’ forecasts and surprising with its wide cross-country dispersion. This paper analyzes the key drivers of the inflation surge in Europe and its variation across countries. The analysis highlights...

U.S. monetary policy can remain extraordinarily accommodative only if longer-term inflation expectations stay well-anchored, including in response to commodity price shocks. We find that oil price shocks have a statistically significant, but economically small impact on longer-term inflation...

We present a newly developed Quarterly Projection Model (QPM) for Vietnam. This QPM represents an extended version of the canonical New Keynesian semi-structural model, accounting for Vietnam-specific factors, including a hybrid monetary policy framework. The model incorporates the array of...

We offer a novel methodology for assessing the quality of inflation reports. In contrast to the existing literature, which mostly evaluates the formal quality of these reports, we evaluate their economic content by comparing inflation factors reported by the central banks with ex-post...

This paper investigates various output gap measures in a simple inflation forecasting framework. Reflecting the cyclical position of an economy, an (unobservable) output gap has important implications for economic analysis. I construct and compare common output gap measures for five European...

The output gap which measures the deviation of actual output from its potential is frequently used as an indicator of slack in an economy. This paper estimates the Finnish output gap using various empirical methods. It evaluates these methods against economic history and each other by a...