Abstract:
In this paper, we examine the extent to which monetary policy should respond to movements in sectoral inflation rates. To do this we construct a Generalised Taylor model that takes specific account of the sectoral make-up of the consumer price index (CPI). We calibrate the model for each sector using the UK CPI microdata. We find that a policy rule that allows for different responses to inflation in different sectors outperforms a rule which just targets aggregate CPI, as does a rule that responds only to non food and energy inflation. However, we find that the optimal sectoral rule only leads to a small absolute improvement in terms of extra consumption.
