The paper presents an incomplete competition model (ICM), where inflation is determined jointly with unit labour cost growth. The ICM is estimated on data for the Euro area and evaluated against existing models, i.e. the implicit inflation equation of the Area Wide model (AWM) - cf. Fagan, Henry...

In the paper we propose a new methodological approach to core inflation estimation, based on a frequency domain principal components estimator, suited to estimate systems of fractionally cointegrated processes. The proposed core inflation measure is the scaled common persistent factor in...