Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae … different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of … how accurately the CPI informs us about "true" inflation. We use the largest price and quantity dataset ever employed in …

Two strands of the literature suggest that PPI inflation, rather than CPI inflation, should be the targeting variable … in a monetary policy rule. The distinction between these two rules would only be important if the two inflation indices … do not co-move strongly. The first contribution of this paper is to document that the two inflation gauges did co …

China has experienced remarkably stable growth and inflation in recent years according to official statistics. We … alternative estimates of Chinese growth and inflation. Our estimates suggest that official statistics present a smoothed version … of reality. Official inflation rose in the 2000's, but our estimates indicate that true inflation was still higher and …

2017 to shed light on how online inflation compares to overall inflation, and to gauge the magnitude of new product bias … online. The Adobe data contain transaction prices and quantities purchased. We estimate that online inflation was about 1 … online, implies roughly 2 percentage points lower inflation than in a matched model/CPI-style index …

monetary policymaking. First, we discuss why trimmed means provide the best measure of core inflation. Second, we outline how … rigidities impede policymakers' ability to control inflation. And third, we describe how alternative shock/rigidity combinations … create inflation's grease (whereby it improves economic efficiency by speeding adjustment) and sand effects (whereby it …

As central bankers intensify their focus on inflation as the primary goal of monetary policy, it becomes increasingly … important to have accurate and reliable measures of changes in the aggregate price level. Measuring inflation is surprisingly … transitory noise and bias. Noise causes short-run changes in measured inflation to inaccurately reflect movements in long …

The debate over including asset prices in the construction of an inflation statistic has attracted renewed attention in … inflation at the retail level. In this paper, we take an alternative, longer-term perspective on the issue and argue that the … exclusion of asset prices introduces an 'excluded goods bias' in the computation of the inflation statistic that is of interest …

In this paper, we investigate the use of limited-information estimators as measures of core inflation. Employing a …-sectional distribution of inflation can cause substantial noise in the aggregate price index at high frequencies. The model suggests that … limited-influence estimators, such as the median of the cross-sectional distribution of inflation, will provide superior short …

This paper shows that conventional measures of cost-of-living inflation, based on static models of consumption, suffer …