Are Weekly Inflation Forecasts Informative?

Marlene Amstad and Andreas M. Fischer

Issue
2008-05

Pages
43

JEL classification
E52, E58

Keywords
Inflation, Common Factors, Sequential Information Flow

Year
2008

Are weekly inflation forecasts informative? Although several central banks review and discuss monetary policy issues on a bi-weekly basis, there have been few attempts by analysts to construct systematic estimates of core inflation that supports such a decision-making schedule. The timeliness of news releases and macroeconomic revisions are recognized to be an important information source in real-time estimation. We incorporate real-time information from macroeconomic releases and revisions into our weekly updates of monthly Swiss core inflation using a common factor procedure. The weekly estimates for Swiss core inflation find that it is worthwhile to update the forecast at least twice a month.