Composite indicators are increasingly important in country comparisons and in policy making. At the same time, the robustness of the results obtained and in particular of the rankings and the conclusions obtained from the analysis it is usually accepted with doubts. In this sense our proposal is...

We propose a simple but effective estimation procedure to extract the level and the volatilitydynamics of a latent macroeconomic factor from a panel of observable indicators. Our approachis based on a multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic exact factor model that cantake into account the...

This study provides strong empirical support for modeling the demand for monetary assets within a consumer demand framework. We estimate a linearised locally flexible almost ideal demand system, containing five monetary assets, over the period 1991Q4 to 1998Q4. Estimating the system in...

Using non-parametric weak separability tests that are extended to allow for measurement errors in the data, a broad group of UK monetary assets is found to be weakly separable from consumer goods and leisure over the larger part of the nineties. Financial innovations have made assets with...

We create a new weekly index of retail trade that accurately predicts the U.S. Census Bureau's Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS). The index's weekly frequency provides an early snapshot of the MRTS and allows for a more granular analysis of the aggregate consumer response to fast-moving events...

Using frequency domain techniques to separate short and long run dynamics and decomposing inflation into its common and idiosyncratic components, we study the regime dependence of the inflation-RPV relation in Argentina and the USA. Under High inflation, strong long-run comovement between RPV...

We use scanner data to estimate inflation rates at the household level. Households' inflation rates have an annual interquartile range of 6.2 to 9.0 percentage points. Most of the heterogeneity comes not from variation in broadly defined consumption bundles but from variation in prices paid for...

We use novel and unique data to study the effect of price changes in the market for luxury and middle class homes. We find that luxury home sales respond less to price changes than the middle-class home sales; in the market for luxury homes, past prices affect current prices; luxury home prices...

9-ending prices are a dominant feature of many retail settings, which according to the existing literature, is because consumers perceive them as being relatively low. Are 9-ending prices really lower than comparable non 9-ending prices? Surprisingly, the empirical evidence on this question is...

This paper focuses on the formation of inflation expectations of consumers in 9 Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) countries. Using data from the OeNB Euro Survey, a large cross-country consumer survey, we show that the difference between realized inflation and reported inflation...