This paper briefly summarizes the analysis and findings of the 1996 Boskin Commission Report, Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living. It then reviews the comments and criticisms that appeared soon after the Report was issued and provides responses to the more important criticisms....

The recent financial crisis in Indonesia has resulted in dramatic price increases. Using very recent data, we investigate whether these price increases have impacted the cost-of-living of poor households in a disproportionately harsh way. We find that the poor have indeed been hit hardest. Just...

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...

What are the unequal effects of changes in consumer prices on the cost of living? In the context of changes in import prices, most analyses focus on variation across households in initial expenditure shares on imported goods. However, the unequal welfare effects of non-marginal foreign price...

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

Economic shocks are notoriously difficult to predict but recent research suggests qualitative metrics about economic actors' expectations are predictive of downturns. We show consumer expectations indices from both the Conference Board and the University of Michigan predict economic downturns up...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

In a broad class of sticky price models the non-neutrality of nominal shocks is encoded by a simple sufficient statistic: the ratio of the kurtosis of the size-distribution of price changes over the frequency of price changes. We test this theoretical prediction using data for a large number of...

Our paper seeks to provide an explanation for why the prevalence of COLA provisions and their characteristics vary widely across U.S. industries. We develop models of optimal risk sharing between a firm and union that allows us to investigate the determinants of a number of characteristics of...

Much of the opposition to indexation as a means of adapting to on going inflation arises from the view that indexation is itself inflationary. This paper examines the basis for that view in a simple macroeconomic model in which budget deficits are in part financed through the printing of money....