The aim of this paper is to estimate the changeover's inflationary impact in Italy and Milan and make an assessment of the official methodology used by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). The changeover's inflationary impact has been estimated in 0.6-0.7 percentage points in Italy,...

The paper reviews the sources of «Upward bias» and «Downward bias» in the USConsumer Price Index (CPI) and discusses the changes the Bureau of Labor Statistics has introduced in order to eliminate them. The remaining biases are quantified. Also, the question is raised how much the changes to...

The main approaches to measuring hedonic indexes in the academic literature are the imputation approach and the time dummy approach. This paper compares both approaches, discusses an alternative method called hedonic re-pricing, and comments on a recent contribution by Diewert et al. (2009). The...

This paper explores the determinants of the heterogeneity in the expenditure behaviors of the Italian households, using the Households Expenditure Survey provided by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) for the year 2005. We assume that differences among consumers are associated...

This paper provides a brief introduction to a proposed new opportunity cost treatment of owner occupied housing in measures of inflation for the United States. In addition, the paper introduces, and provides links to, a collection of nine other papers that discuss various aspects of the...

Statistical agencies in different nations usually use the rental equivalence approach to the treatment of housing in their CPIs but a few countries use the user cost approach. The paper argues that an opportunity cost approach is the correct theoretical framework for accounting for OOH in a CPI....

This paper sets out a general algorithm for calculating true cost-of-living indices or true producer price indices when demand is not homothetic, i.e. when not all expenditure elasticities are equal to one. In principle, economic theory tells us how we should calculate a true cost-of-living...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

The success and failure of any democratic government is gauged in terms of how effectively it has fulfilled its constitutional obligation of enhancing social and economic well-being, particularly the common man. While developed economies use a set of indices to measure well-being, a systematic...