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 …

An important input to monetary policymaking is estimating the current level of inflation. This paper examines … empirically whether the measurement of trend inflation can be improved by using disaggregated data on sectoral inflation to … construct indexes akin to core inflation, but with time-varying distributed lags of weights, where the sectoral weight depends …

This paper investigates the use of trimmed means as high-frequency estimators of" inflation. The known characteristics … that simple averages of price data are" unlikely to produce efficient estimates of inflation. Trimmed means produce … superior estimates" of core inflation,' which we define as a long-run centered moving average of CPI and PPI" inflation. We …

As inflation approaches zero, it becomes increasingly important to examine the price indices on which monetary policy … index of the cost-of-living, is that there are likely to be biases in the index as a measure of inflation. In this paper we … inherent in the CPI as a measure of inflation--weighting bias. Utilizing a dynamic factor model we are able to compute the …

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 …

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

This paper analyzes the long-run determinants of inflation differentials in a monetary union. First, we aim at … establishingsome stylized facts relating the regional dispersion in headline inflation rates in the euro area as well as in the main … the primary cause of price and inflation differentials, with shocks to productivity in the traded sector being largely …