The average price of treating a colorectal cancer patient with chemotherapy increased from about $100 in 1993 to $36,000 in 2005, due largely to the approval and widespread use of five new drugs between 1996 and 2004. We examine whether the substantial increase in spending has been worth it....

A policy issue central banks are confronted with is whether inflation targets should be adjusted to account for the systematic upward bias in measured inflation due to quality improvements in consumption goods. We show that in the context of a Ramsey equilibrium the answer to this question...

Backcasting upward bias in price index over long periods of time yields levels of real consumption two or four centuries ago that are implausibly low, raising the possibility that price index bias for important products may have been zero or even negative at some point in the past. This paper...

We push the span of hedonic price calculations for automobiles backwards towards the industry's birth. Most of the real change that occurred between 1906 and 1982 occurred between 1906 and 1940. During these years, hedonic prices fell at an average annual rate of 5%. The pace was brisker still...

In the second-half of the 1990s, the positive impact of information technology on productivity growth for the United States became apparent. The measurement of this productivity improvement depends on hedonic procedures adopted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Bureau of Economic...

In this paper we provide a simple, credible method for assessing the effects of climate change on the quality of agricultural land and then apply this method using a rich set of data on the vineyards of the Mosel Valley in Germany. The basic idea is to use a simple model of solar radiation to...

In this paper we consider the conditions under which instrumental variables methods are required in estimating a hedonic price function and its accompanying demand and supply relations. We assume simple functional forms that permit an explicit solution for the equilibrium hedonic price function....

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

The hedonic model of Rosen (1974) has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well-documented econometric problems. For example, Bartik (1987) and Epple (1987) each describe a source of endogeneity in the second stage of Rosen's procedure...

To investigate how fuel economy is valued in the Indian car market, we compute the cost to Indian consumers of purchasing a more fuel-efficient vehicle and compare it to the benefit of lower fuel costs over the life of the vehicle. We use hedonic price functions for four market segments (petrol...