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Consumers purchase energy in many forms. Sometimes energy goods are consumed directly, for instance, in the form of gasoline used to operate a vehicle, electricity to light a home, or natural gas to heat a home. At other times, the cost of energy is embodied in the prices of goods and services that consumers buy, say when purchasing an airline ticket or when buying online garden furniture made from plastic to be delivered by mail. Previous research has focused on quantifying the pass-through of the price of crude oil or the price of motor gasoline to U.S. inflation. Neither approach accounts for the fact that percent changes in refined product prices need not be proportionate to the percent change in the price of oil, that not all energy is derived from oil, and that the correlation of price shocks across energy markets is far from one. This paper develops a vector autoregressive model that quantifies the joint impact of shocks to several energy prices on headline and core CPI inflation. Our analysis confirms that focusing on gasoline price shocks alone will underestimate the inflationary pressures emanating from the energy sector, but not enough to overturn the conclusion that much of the observed increase in headline inflation in 2021 and 2022 reflected non-energy price shocks.
Predictions of oil prices reaching $100 per barrel during the winter of 2021/22 have raised fears of persistently high inflation and rising inflation expectations for years to come. We show that these concerns have been overstated. A $100 oil scenario of the type discussed by many observers, would only briefly raise monthly headline inflation, before fading rather quickly. However, the short-run effects on headline inflation would be sizable. For example, on a yearover- year basis, headline PCE inflation would increase by 1.8 percentage points at the end of 2021 under this scenario, and by 0.4 percentage points at the end of 2022. In contrast, the impact on measures of core inflation such as trimmed mean PCE inflation is only 0.4 and 0.3 percentage points in 2021 and 2022, respectively. These estimates already account for any increases in inflation expectations under the scenario. The peak response of the 1-year household inflation expectation would be 1.2 percentage points, while that of the 5-year expectation would be 0.2 percentage points.