The Importance of Trend Inflation in the Search for Missing Disinflation

Some inflation-forecasting models based on the Phillips curve suggest that there should have been more disinflation since the Great Recession than has shown up in core PCE or core CPI data. One way researchers have found to make the disinflation disappear is to remove the long-term unemployed from the overall unemployment measure that is typically used in the models. This analysis shows that the disinflation arises in such models because of the way they account for the long-term trend in inflation. Under a different measurement of trend inflation, which historical forecast accuracy suggests should be preferable, the recent path of inflation can be reasonably well explained by an inflation-forecasting model that incorporates the overall unemployment rate.