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),...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Our paper studies the relationship between money growth and consumer price inflation in the euro area using wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis allows to account for variations in the money growth-inflation relationship both across the frequency spectrum and across time. We find evidence of...

A major challenge for monetary policy has been predicting how exchange rate movements will impact inflation. We propose a new focus: incorporating the underlying shocks that cause exchange rate fluctuations when evaluating how these fluctuations "pass through" into import and consumer prices. We...