From 2014 until present, housing prices in Germany have been rising faster than consumer prices in all quarters except one, raising concerns about an excessive over-heating of the housing market. To assess the vulnerability of the German housing market to a future realignment of prices or even a...

Over the last three decades the supply of economic statistics has vastly improved. Unfortunately, statistics on regional price levels (sub-national purchasing power parities) have been exempt from this positive trend, even though they are indispensable for meaningful spatial comparisons of...

Spatial price comparisons rely to a high degree on the quality of the underlying price data that are collected within or across countries. Below the basic heading level, these price data often exhibit large gaps. Therefore, stochastic index number methods like the CPDmethod and the GEKS method...

From September 2011 to January 2015, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) implemented a minimum exchange rate regime (i.e. a one-sided target zone) vis-a-vis the euro to fight deflationary pressures in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis. During this period of unconventional monetary policy,...

In Germany, package holidays are an important driver of consumer prices. Several challenges arise when measuring the price development of these bundled travel and accommodation services, such as the quality of accommodation and the timing of booking. Statistical practices are currently based on...

The compilation of commercial property price indices is a big challenge. In Germany, substantive data gaps prevent the calculation of official figures by the national statistical authority. By contrast, policymakers urge for timely, reliable and comprehensive data. In this paper, proposals are...

The shifts in household consumption caused by the coronavirus pandemic affect inflation measurement in the euro area via the updating of product weights. We propose a decomposition of the inflation rate, measured by the annual percentage change of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP),...

The present paper shows that product-specific regional price dispersion usually causes the Country-Product-Dummy (CPD) method to be biased. In cases where it is not, this index number method is still inefficient and inference is invalid. In view of this, a nonlinear generalization of the CPD...

How much does quality adjustment matter in measuring consumer price inflation? To address this question, we use different sources of micro and macro price data for Germany and the euro area. For Germany, we find that quality adjustment applies to a large range of goods and services but, on...

Current HICP measurement practices produce an upward bias of about one-ninth of a percentage point in German inflation due to changing consumption being disregarded and the preliminary data being used in the compilation of expenditure weights. The statistical uncertainty produced by these...