Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

No cross-sectional consumer price index is currently available by state, and the BLS's cross-sectional "family budget" index for metropolitan areas is not well-suited for cross-state analyses. In this paper we propose an algorithm for constructing a state-specific Laspeyres price index using...

Key macro indicators such as output, productivity, and inflation are based on a complex system across multiple statistical agencies using different samples and different levels of aggregation. The Census Bureau collects nominal sales, the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects prices, and the...

Empirical studies using micro data find that about two thirds of all product prices do not change in a given quarter. This evidence has been interpreted as indicating the absence of price indexation. Further, models of staggered price setting without indexation interpret all price changes as...

The average price of treating a colorectal cancer patient with chemotherapy increased from about $100 in 1993 to $36,000 in 2005, due largely to the approval and widespread use of five new drugs between 1996 and 2004. We examine whether the substantial increase in spending has been worth it....

This paper provides a justification for hedonic price indices and details the properties of hedonic price functions. The analysis is done in a market setting in which a finite number of goods, each defined by its characteristics, interact. We note that proper hedonic indices can be constructed...

This paper investigates the use of high-frequency scanner data to construct price indexes. In the presence of inventory behavior, purchases and consumption by individuals differ over time. Cost-of-living indexes can still be constructed using data on purchases. For weekly data on canned tuna,...

We review in considerable detail the conceptual and measurement issues that underlie construction of medical care price indexes in the U.S., particularly the medical care consumer price indexes (MCPIs) and medical-related producer price indexes (MPPIs). We outline salient features of the medical...

The purpose of this paper is to identify conditions under which hedonic price indexes provide an exact measure of consumer welfare. Our results provide a rationale for existing practices in the case where prices equal marginal costs. In that case, both the marginal value of characteristics and a...

We begin with a description of three house price panel data sets for the period 1982 to 1991. Next, we estimate a model that assumes the three sources are derived from an underlying unobserved price series, and we construct composite indexes that report house prices for 135 locations. These...