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...

Millions of goods and services are now unavailable in many countries due to the current coronavirus pandemic, dramatically impacting on the construction of key economic statistics used for informing policy. This situation is unprecedented; hence methods to address it have not previously been...

We use Adobe Analytics data on online transactions for millions of products in many different categories from 2014 to 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...

This paper shows how to generate the joint distribution of correlated random variables with specified marginal distributions. For cases where the marginal distributions are either normal or lognormal, it shows how to calculate analytically the correlation of the underlying normal distributions...

The real exchange rate (RER) has been called the single most important price, yet its behavior exhibits several puzzles. In this project, we use Big Mac prices as a unique prism to study the movement of real exchange rates. Part of our innovation is to match these prices to the prices of...

In this paper, we investigate the use of limited-information estimators as measures of core inflation. Employing a model of asymmetric supply disturbances, with costly price adjustment, we show how the observed skewness in the cross-sectional distribution of inflation can cause substantial noise...

This paper shows that conventional measures of cost-of-living inflation, based on static models of consumption, suffer from two problems. The first is an intertemporal substitution bias, as these measures neglect the ability of consumers to borrow and lend in response to price changes. The...