In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

The establishment of European monetary union (EMU) was widely expected to cause price convergence among member states. In an investigation of this claim, the present study avoids problems of comparability and representativeness by using an extremely detailed and comprehensive scanner database on...

Empirical evidence suggests that a monetary shock induces the exchange rate to overshoot its long-run level. The estimated magnitude and timing of the overshooting, however, varies across studies. This paper generates delayed overshooting in a new Keynesian model of a small open economy by...

We analyse the adjustment of retail and services prices in a period of low inflation, using a set of individual price data from the German Consumer Price Index which covers the years 1998 to 2003. We strong find evidence of time- and state-dependent price adjustment. Most importantly, the...

In several studies, hedonic methods have been used successfully for the ex post assessment of the accuracy of inflation measurement. Most of those studies relate to high-tech products, with respect to which traditional methods of compiling price indices often fail. We apply hedonic methods to...

By disaggregating price indices, it becomes apparent that the real exchange rate consists of the real exchange rate for a single good and a weighted sum of relative prices between goods. When applying a battery of panel unit root tests to this sum and its components, it is found that both the...

In this paper we present a critical overview of differnt methods of constructing an equilibrium exchange rate. The recent literature on purchasing power parity (PPP) indicates that on its own PPP is not a good vehicle for defining an equilibrium exchange rate. Rather, we argue that the latter...

Panel unit root tests of real exchange rates – as opposed to univariate tests – usually reject non-stationarity. These tests, however, could be biased if the real exchange rate contained MA roots. Indeed, two independent arguments claim that the real exchange rate, being a sum of a...

In February 1998 a work was published in the series of discussion papers produced by the Bundesbank which was concemed with problems of measuring inflation in Gerrnany. This paper met with a lively response. The Research Group of the Bundesbank therefore staged a workshop on this subject at...