We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. With a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design, we exploit a historical quasiexperiment in Western Switzerland, where in the 16th...

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...

In this paper we propose an alternative to traditional hedonics for estimating new multiunit housing inflation, adjusting for quality changes. By relying on the within-site variation we control in a very general way for unobserved housing characteristics using site-specific effects. Precise...

The paper analyzes the problems of measurement of durable consumer prices posed by quality change. Theoretical price indexes are defined and used to analyze several empirical methods of estimation of quality adjusted price indexes. The paper shows that hedonic regressions and other quality...

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the single most important indicator of inflation used by the European Central Bank. Sections 2 to 4 of the paper look at the theory of inflation indexes that could be used as target indexes of inflation. A Consumer Price Index (CPI) emerges as...

The Harmonized Index Of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the primary measure of inflation in the euro area, and plays a central role in the policy deliberations of the European Central Bank (ECB). Among the rationales given for defining price stability as prevailing at some positive measured inflation...

User-cost indexes provide important information about the welfare implications of durable goods purchases. In this paper indexes for the cost of private transportation are developed, based on the costs associated with using new passenger cars sold in 1992-1999, in the Netherlands. The paper...

This paper presents a revealed preference method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual or reservation price of a new good and suggests a way to improve these bounds by using budget expansion paths. This allows the calculation of cost-of-living and price indices when the number of goods...

Statistical offices use the matched models method to compile consumer price indices (CPIs) to measure inflation. The prices of a sample of models are recorded, and then price collectors visit the same stores each subsequent month to record the prices of the same matched sample of models. The...

The Boskin report (1996) concluded that the US consumer price index (CPI) overestimated the inflation by 1.1 percentage points. This was due to several measurement errors in the CPI. One of them is called quality change bias. We compare two methods in this paper which can be used to correct for...