The Center for Inflation Research is guided by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and an advisory council consisting of leading experts from the United States and abroad who provide external perspectives and input into the Center's projects and conferences.
Get technical or just get started with inflation fundamentals. Learn what inflation means, how it's measured, the Fed’s role, and other key concepts such as price indexes, hyperinflation, trend and underlying inflation, and measures of inflation including CPI and PCE.
Find information about our dedicated inflation conferences, papers presented at our past conferences, and our sponsorship of conference sessions.
We explain why expected inflation is important to consumers and the Federal Reserve and how it affects actual inflation. We explain the two basic approaches to measuring them, model-based and survey-based measures.
We explain how measures of consumer prices are computed and what the differences are between the consumer price index (CPI) and the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index. We explain various measures used to gauge underlying inflation, or the long-term trend in prices, such as medians and other trimmed-mean measures and core measures of inflation.