This paper assesses the usefulness of the commonly used underlying inflation indicator, in light of the criteria proposed in Marques et al. (2000). Empirical evidence for a group of six countries strongly suggets that the use of underlying inflation as an indicator of trend inflation should be...

This paper investigates the consequences of non-stationarity for the principal components analysis and suggests a data transformation that allows obtaining smoother series for the first principal component to be used as a core inflation indicator. The paper also introduces a theoretical model,...