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Working Paper
The Cyclicality of Sales, Regular and Effective Prices: Comment
Coibion, Gorodnichenko, and Hong (2015) argue that the CPI underestimates the deceleration in consumer prices during economic downturns because the index fails to account for the reallocation of consumer spending from high- to low-price stores. We show that these authors' measures of inflation with and without store switching suffer from several methodological deficiencies, including an excessive truncation of price adjustments and the lack of a treatment for missing observations. When we address these deficiencies, the authors' key regression results no longer suggest that greater store ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Component Disaggregation on Measures of the Median and Trimmed-Mean CPI
For decades, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (FRBC) has produced median and trimmed-mean consumer price index (CPI) measures. These have proven useful in various contexts, such as forecasting and understanding post-COVID inflation dynamics. Revisions to the FRBC methodology have historically involved increasing the level of disaggregation in the CPI components, which has improved accuracy. Thus, it may seem logical that further disaggregation would continue to enhance its accuracy. However, we theoretically demonstrate that this may not necessarily be the case. We then explore the ...
Working Paper
Disentangling rent index differences: data, methods, and scope
Rent measurement determines 32 percent of the CPI. Accurate rent measurement is therefore essential for accurate inflation measurement, but the CPI rent index often differs from alternative measures of rent inflation. Using repeat-rent inflation measures created from CPI microdata, we show that this discrepancy is largely explained by differences in rent growth for new tenants relative to all tenants. New-tenant rent inflation provides information about future all-tenant rent inflation, but the use of new-tenant rents is contraindicated in a cost-of-living index such as the CPI. Nevertheless, ...
Working Paper
Tracking Trend Inflation: Nonseasonally Adjusted Variants of the Median and Trimmed-Mean CPI
We make five contributions. We demonstrate that extant trimmed-mean and median CPI construction procedures depart from Bureau of Labor Statistics index construction procedures, and that the departures don't make much of a difference. We produce nonseasonally adjusted variants of the trimmed-mean CPI and median CPI, and demonstrate that these are useful real-time estimates of trend inflation; the NSA median CPI outperforms the median CPI, but both SA and NSA variants of the median and the trimmed-mean CPI easily dominate the so-called "core" CPI. We introduce superior ex post measures of trend ...
Working Paper
Determinants of Differential Rent Changes: Mean Reversion versus the Usual Suspects
We study 2001-2004 and 2004-2007 rent growth of 18,000 rental units, ending our study prior to the Great Recession. Which variables correlate with rent growth: Location? Age? Rent level? Occupancy duration? Structure type? The answers deepen understanding of the rental market, help statistical agencies make decisions about sample stratification and substitution, and expose coverage problems. We document significant rent stickiness. Initial relative rent level is the best predictor, though mainly due to mean reversion. "Location" comes in second, though often not statistically significantly: ...