From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to 1⁄4 of disposable income. We use household-level data to explain the postponing of consumption despite rapid income growth. Tracing cohorts over time indicates virtually no consumption smoothing...

Household savings behavior in China during the past 30 years has been studied by using econometric models with the time-varying-parameter technique. The rural sector and the urban sector are investigated separately. In comparison to previous studies on the same subject, the estimated models of...

This paper estimates exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in emerging markets focusing on non-linearities and asymmetries. We document non-linearities and asymmetries in the transmission of exchange rate fluctuations to prices using local projection techniques to obtain state dependent...

The consumer price index (CPI) is a key economic indicator used to gauge inflation, adjust wages, pensions, and social benefits. The producer prices index (PPI) is used for forecasting and deflating GDP estimates. Both indexes are used by the Fund, policymakers, and researchers for global,...

Price index compilers frequently face situations where price observations are missing due to seasonal unavailability, supply shortages, or the discontinuation of products. Incorrect treatment of such situations can result in biased price indices. This paper presents statistical imputation...

Prais (1958) showed that the CPI computed by statistical agencies can be interpreted as a weighed average of household price indexes, the weight of each household determined by its total expenditures. We decompose the difference between the standard CPI and a democratically weighed index (i.e.,...

This paper investigates how consumer price inflation is determined in Mali for 1979-2006 along three macroeconomic explanations: (1) monetarist theories, emphasizing the impact of excess money supply, (2) the structuralist hypothesis, stressing the impact of supply-side constraints, and (3)...

This paper investigates, using cointegration and Granger-causality techniques, whether a stable long-run co-movement exists between world commodity prices and U.K. retail prices, and whether short-run changes in commodity prices convey information about future movements in U.K. retail prices....