This paper illustrates how public goods may be incorporated into a cost-of-living index. When public goods are weak complements to a market good, quality-adjusted prices for the market good capture all the welfare information required. They are also consistent with a Laspeyres index that...

This paper suggests two theoretically consistent and empirically tractable ways that a cost-ofliving index can be expanded to include the environment and other public goods. In addition, it presents an empirical illustration of such an index for Los Angeles, California, incorporating air quality...

The standard cost-of-living index hinges on the assumption that there is free trade. Applying it to situations where trade barriers are present yields biased results with respect to a true cost-of-living index. Import price indices are particularly vulnerable to this bias since many of the goods...

According to the present guidelines for fiscal policy, the use of oil revenues in the Norwegian economy should over time equal the expected real return on the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG). An important question is therefore how to measure the real return, taking into account that the...

The Norwegian productivity puzzle is rooted in three seemingly contradictory "facts": First, Norway is one of the most productive OECD countries. Second, Norway has experienced high growth in productivity. Third, Norway has a relatively low level of R&D intensity. In this article, I show that...

Decompositions of international price indices are usually inexact in the sense that the underlying aggregator formula is not exactly reproduced. In this paper, we compare analytically the exact and inexact decompositions of international price indices, paying particular attention to the bias in...

Previous studies on the relationship between exchange rates and traded goods prices typically find evidence of incomplete pass-through, usually explained by pricing-to-market behaviour. Although economic theory predicts that incomplete pass-through may also be linked to presence of non-tariff...

Aggregation of international prices in empirical work is generally based on well known index number formulas. However, a common practice applying such formulas is the use of price indices rather than price levels for which data across countries are rarely available. Numerical calculations of...

Statistics Norway has a long history of using scanner data in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The early research - in Norway as well as internationally - was focused on supermarket data which consists largely of stable items. The attention has since gradually shifted towards the parts of...

We quantify general equilibrium effects of place-based policies in a multiregion framework with mobility, trade and agglomeration economies. Using detailed data on EU transfers, we infer the local effects of different transfer types on productivity, income and transportation cost. Based on these...