02561cas a2200337 a 4500 AALejournalIMF022243 230101c9999 xx r poo 0 0eng d 5.00 USD 9781616357580 1018-5941 BD-DhAAL BD-DhAAL Ball, Laurence. Measuring U.S. Core Inflation : The Stress Test of COVID-19 / Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, Prachi Mishra, Antonio Spilimbergo. Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2021. 1 online resource (27 pages) IMF Working Papers <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students Large price changes in industries affected by the COVID-19 pandemic have caused erratic fluctuations in the U.S. headline inflation rate. This paper compares alternative approaches to filtering out the transitory effects of these industry price changes and measuring the underlying or core level of inflation over 2020-2021. The Federal Reserve's preferred measure of core, the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices (XFE), has performed poorly: over most of 2020-21, it is almost as volatile as headline inflation. Measures of core that exclude a fixed set of additional industries, such as the Atlanta Fed's sticky-price inflation rate, have been less volatile, but the least volatile have been measures that filter out large price changes in any industry, such as the Cleveland Fed's median inflation rate and the Dallas Fed's trimmed mean inflation rate. These core measures have followed smooth paths, drifting down when the economy was weak in 2020 and then rising as the economy has rebounded. Overall, we find that the case for the Federal Reserve to move away from the traditional XFE measure of core has strengthened during 2020-21. Mode of access: Internet Central Banks and Their Policies imf Deflation imf Inflation, Business Fluctuations and Central Banks imf Inflation imf Price Level imf Leigh, Daniel. Mishra, Prachi. Spilimbergo, Antonio. IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2021/291 Full text available on IMF http://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2021/291/001.2021.issue-291-en.xml IMF e-Library