Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic will hear the case for excluding housing from measures of consumer prices that the U.S. central bank targets when he meets this week with Fed Up, an advocacy group focused on monetary policy.

The group will present a paper on U.S. housing inflation by Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. Baker argues in the paper that the widening gap between inflation in the housing sector and the rest of the economy gives central bankers a misleading impression of how tight monetary policy really is.

Excluding housing shows that “most sectors of the economy are seeing a real interest rate that is considerably higher than the core inflation rate implies,” Baker wrote.

Bostic’s background is in housing economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as assistant secretary for policy development and research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His most widely cited work is a 2007 paper examining the effects of housing wealth on consumer spending.

Fed Up said it plans to meet with Bostic on Thursday.

The Fed’s interest-rate setting committee has voted on seven quarter-point increases since it began raising rates from near-zero levels in 2015, and signaled after its most recent gathering that it would probably raise rates twice more before the year is out. Bostic, who has a vote on the committee this year, said on June 18 he favors one more 2018 increase.

Core inflation -- a measure that excludes volatile food and energy prices -- was 1.8 percent in April, according to Commerce Department data. Excluding housing costs, it was 1.4 percent. The Fed has a 2 percent target for total inflation, but uses the core gauge as a guide to where total inflation is likely headed.

“The rapid pace of increase in shelter costs is not due to rising construction costs, but rather due to restrictive zoning practices in a limited number of highly desirable metropolitan areas that have limited the supply of housing,” Baker wrote. “If shelter costs are removed from core measures of inflation there is zero evidence of any acceleration in the inflation rate” over the last five years, he added.