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This paper examines the comovement of prices with the cyclical component of output. It argues that determining the cyclical behavior of prices by applying the same stationarity-inducing transformation to the levels of both output and prices, and examining the correlations of the resulting series, can be misleading. A more appropriate procedure is to examine the correlations between the rate of inflation and the level of the cyclical component of output. In post-war U.S. data the correlations between similarly transformed price and output data are consistently and often strongly negative, as reported recently by a number of authors as evidence of countercyclical price behavior. The rate of inflation, however, is consistently and usually strongly positively correlated with various measures of the cyclical component of output.

Inflation --- Macroeconomics --- Economic Theory --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Business Fluctuations --- Cycles --- Agriculture: Aggregate Supply and Demand Analysis --- Prices --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- Economic theory & philosophy --- Economic growth --- Supply shocks --- Business cycles --- Sticky prices --- Economic theory --- Supply and demand --- United States