Search Results
Journal Article
A fitter, trimmer core inflation measure
Journal Article
Price hedonics: a critical review
This paper was presented at the conference "Economic Statistics: New Needs for the Twenty-First Century," cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and the National Association for Business Economics, July 11, 2002. The main objective of this paper is to make a start in the evaluation of price hedonics. The author describes the hedonic model and reviews its main uses, because the credibility of price hedonics depends in part on the current state of academic research. This is a brief overview. The author then turns to some of the ...
Journal Article
Problems measuring prices
Journal Article
Do rising rents complicate inflation assessment?
In the face of falling house prices, decreasing rates of homeownership, and a glut of vacant homes, the Consumer Price Index?s measure of the cost of owner-occupied housing?owners? equivalent rent of residence (OER)?has begun to accelerate, rising at an annualized rate of 2.3 percent over the past six months. Given a backdrop of generally subdued underlying inflation elsewhere in the index, a persistent increase in the relative price of OER?the largest component of the consumer market basket by far?may create upward pressure on measured inflation.
Journal Article
Comparing measures of core inflation
Although many policymakers and analysts associate ?core CPI inflation? with the CPI excluding food and energy, there are other measures of core consumer price inflation. Like the CPI excluding food and energy, these other measures typically attempt to identify the underlying trend in CPI inflation by excluding certain components subject to large relative price changes. The rationale is that unusual changes, such as the 14.2 percent increase in energy prices last year (December to December) or the 18 percent jump in tobacco prices from November to December 1998, are unlikely to be related to ...
Journal Article
Quality change in the CPI
Journal Article
The consumer price index
The consumer price index (CPI) is probably the most closely watched indicator of inflation in the U.S. economy. In this article, Mark Wynne and Fiona Sigalla explain the construction of the CPI and evaluate some of its potential shortcomings as a measure of inflation. Specifically, they examine the discrepancies that arise between the CPI and the true cost- of-living index as a result of improvements in the quality of goods, the introduction of new goods, substitution on the part of consumers between different goods and retail outlets, and the difficulty of measuring the prices actually paid ...
Working Paper
Fast micro and slow macro: can aggregation explain the persistence of inflation?
An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at investigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation sub-indices of the euro area CPI. This allows to decompose the dynamics of inflation sub-indices in two parts: one due to a common
Journal Article
Inflation: measurement and policy issues
The author surveys some problems in measuring inflation and examines the likely costs of anticipated and unanticipated inflation as well as the short-run costs of reducing inflation. He looks at the possibility that an inflationary bias may be implicit in the political economy aspects of the inflation problem, assesses the potential costs and benefits of zero inflation as a policy objective, and considers the possible implications of the inflation problem for monetary policy rules and for the independence of central banks.