We begin with a description of three house price panel data sets for the period 1982 to 1991. Next, we estimate a model that assumes the three sources are derived from an underlying unobserved price series, and we construct composite indexes that report house prices for 135 locations. These...

The purpose of this paper is to identify conditions under which hedonic price indexes provide an exact measure of consumer welfare. Our results provide a rationale for existing practices in the case where prices equal marginal costs. In that case, both the marginal value of characteristics and a...

We provide the first multi-city, constant quality land price index for 35 major markets in China. While there is meaningful heterogeneity in land price growth across cities, on average the last nine years have seen land values skyrocket in many markets, not just those on or near the coast. The...

This paper analyses how the properties of locational equilibrium models can be used to evaluate approaches for constructing price indexes for heterogeneous houses. Housing markets play a key role in locational equilibrium models. Prices for houses determine that implicit costs that households...

We show that hedonic price indexes may be biased when not all product characteristics are observed. We derive two primary sources of bias. The first is a classical selection problem that arises due to changes over time in the values of unobserved characteristics. The second comes from changes in...

This paper provides a justification for hedonic price indices and details the properties of hedonic price functions. The analysis is done in a market setting in which a finite number of goods, each defined by its characteristics, interact. We note that proper hedonic indices can be constructed...

We develop an approach to measuring the cost of living for CES preferences that treats demand shocks as taste shocks that are equivalent to price shocks. In the presence of relative taste shocks, the Sato-Vartia price index is upward biased because an increase in the relative consumer taste for...

An indexed unit of account is a unit of measurement defined using an index such as a consumer price index so that prices defined in terms of these units will automatically adjust to changing economic conditions. Evidence on sticky prices and money illusion, and evidence from countries (notably...

No cross-sectional consumer price index is currently available by state, and the BLS's cross-sectional "family budget" index for metropolitan areas is not well-suited for cross-state analyses. In this paper we propose an algorithm for constructing a state-specific Laspeyres price index using...

In this paper we derive the standard error of a price index when both prices and tastes or technology are treated as stochastic. Changing tastes or technology are a reason for the weights in the price index to be treated as stochastic, which can interact with the stochastic prices themselves. We...