Reverse Kalman Filtering U.S. Inflation with Sticky Professional Forecasts

The trend-cycle model with unobserved components is consistent with numerous studies of US inflation history and is of interest partly because the trend may be viewed as the Fed’s evolving inflation target or long-horizon expected inflation. The sluggish reporting attributed to forecasters is consistent with evidence on mean forecast errors. There is considerable evidence of inflation-gap persistence and some evidence of implicit sticky information. But statistical tests show these two widely used perspectives on US inflation forecasts, the unobserved-components model and the sticky-information model, cannot be reconciled.