Refining Stylized Facts from Factor Models of Inflation
Factor models of disaggregate inflation indices suggest that sectoral shocks generate the bulk of sectoral inflation variance, but no persistence. Aggregate shocks, by contrast, are the root of sectoral inflation persistence, but have negligible relative variance. We show that simple factor models do not cope well with essential features of price data. In particular, sectoral inflation series are subject to features such as measurement error, sales and item substitutions. In…