Many alternative measures of core, or underlying, inflation have been proposed that are based on stripping out some unwanted or excessively volatile elements from the headline rate. A potential drawback of such measures is that they are necessarily atheoretic--based largely on purely statistical...

We consider the fundamental issue of what makes a “good” probability forecast for a central bank operating within an inflation targeting framework. We provide two examples in which the candidate forecasts comfortably outperform those from benchmark specifications by conventional statistical...