Nikolay Gospodinov
Working Paper 2016-5
February 2016
Download the full text of this paper (188 KB) 
This note documents a curious finding about the substantial forecast ability of a simple aggregator of three commodity futures prices for U.S. core inflation. The proposed aggregator reduces the out-of-sample root mean squared error for 12-month-ahead inflation forecasts of the benchmark AR(1) model by 28 percent (20 percent) for the PCE (CPI) measure of core inflation. To avoid obfuscation of the sources of forecast ability, the model is intentionally kept simple, although extensions for improving and increasing the robustness of the forecast procedure are also discussed.
JEL classification: C53, E37, G12
Key words: core inflation, commodity futures, convenience yields, forecasting