The availability of large transaction level datasets, such as retail scanner data, provides a wealth of information on prices and quantities that national statistical institutes can use to produce more accurate, timely, measures of inflation. However, there is no universally agreed upon method...

A method for decomposing nominal value added growth is presented, which identifies the contributions from efficiency change, growth of primary inputs, changes in output and input prices, technical progress and returns to scale. In order to implement the decomposition, an estimate of the relevant...

Using the new Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts as well as other BEA data, we construct productivity accounts for two key sectors of the US economy: the Corporate Nonfinancial Sector (Sector 1) and the Noncorporate Nonfinancial Sector (Sector 2). Calculating...

The welfare contributions of the digital economy, characterized by the proliferation of new and free goods, are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the welfare contributions of these goods and introduce a new metric, GDP-B which quantifies their...

Caves, Christensen, Diewert introduced Malmquist output, input and productivity indexes into production theory in a systematic way. This paper revisits the debate on how to decompose Bjurek's concept of a Malmquist productivity index into explanatory factors, with a focus on extracting technical...

This paper develops a new framework for measuring prices and quantities of commercial properties. In particular, it addresses problems associated with obtaining separate estimates for the land and structure components of a property. A key contribution is to address the problem of estimating...

This paper provides methodologies for evaluating consumer benefits of infrastructure services using potentially observable information. We define benefit measures for consumers and, using general principles from the index number literature, derive alternative first and second order...

Consumers are very responsive to sales, yet statistical agency practice typically under-weights sale prices in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), with some agencies excluding sale prices completely. Evidence is lacking on how this may impact on both the representativeness of prices included in the...

A previously overlooked source of potential bias in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is described. We find that unit value (average) prices, commonly used for construction of the CPI should be constructed over the same period as the index to be constructed, rather than over an incomplete...

It is common for comparisons to be made of output growth and inflation across groups of countries, yet such comparisons can result in inconsistencies. We address two problems: (i) how to measure aggregate real output and inflation for groups of countries and (ii) how to construct measures of...