Seasonally adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) data are inevitably surrounded by uncertainty. Disregarding methodological improvements, two main sources of revisions can be distinguished: First, revisions that reflect the incorporation of more comprehensive or more representative, but...

Consumer price inflation, as measured by the year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), is used by the European Central Bank (ECB) for assessing its monetary policy. The European Statistical System regularly introduces methodological improvements into this...

The preparations for the introduction of the euro in 1999 involved the need for a new set of statistics for the euro area. Since then, significant progress has been made with regard to the coverage, timeliness and accuracy of these statistics. The reliability of the first releases – i.e. their...

The Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) currently only includes rentals for housing (paid by tenants) and auxiliary housing expenditures (paid by both tenants and owners). The inclusion of an item for owner-occupied housing (OOH) would be desirable for both representativeness and...

This paper provides an extensive literature review and analyses some open issues in the measurement of inflation that can only be explored in depth using micro price data. It builds on the analysis done in the context of the ECB's strategy review, which pointed at directions for improvement of...

The well-known problem of too many instruments in dynamic panel data GMM is dealt with in detail in Roodman (2009, Oxford Bull. Econ. Statist.). The present paper goes one step further by providing a solution to this problem: factorisation of the standard instrument set is shown to be a valid...

The well-known problem of too many instruments in dynamic panel data GMM is dealt with in detail in Roodman (2009, Oxford Bull. Econ. Statist.). The present paper goes one step further by providing a solution to this problem: factorisation of the standard instrument set is shown to be a valid...

The present paper explores, both theoretically and empirically, the bias of unit value indices as opposed to genuine price indices in foreign trade. An analysis of German data reveals conceptual and methodological differences, and their impact on economic indicators, namely imported inflation,...

Inflation rates of more than 3% in Germany during some months in the spring and summer of 2008 have been giving rise to claims from both politicians and the unions for social measures for welfare recipients. It is argued that the burden of inflation is heterogeneously distributed among different...

How much does quality adjustment matter in measuring consumer price inflation? To address this question, we use different sources of micro and macro price data for Germany and the euro area. For Germany, we find that quality adjustment applies to a large range of goods and services but, on...