The author summarizes the report’s methods, findings, and recommendations, and then reviews the comments and criticisms that appeared soon after the report was issued. Changes in CPI methodology are also summarized and assessed, as is recent research on related issues. Based on recent...

The author provides a BLS response to the Boskin Commission from the perspective of ten years following the release of the report. He documents the research on price indexes done at the BLS in the first half of the 1990s that pointed to upward CPI bias, and discusses how these results eventually...

The author highlights the extremely salutatory effect the Boskin Commission has had on international price statistics, promoting open discussion of price measurement issues, engendering dialogue between statistical agencies and users, and encouraging research. Less positive in the author'sview...

The author supports the type of the back-of-the-envelope calculations of CPI bias that the Commission used so effectively to attract public attention to its report. In the area of quality adjustment, however, he criticizes the Boskin Commission for what he calls “premature extrapolation,”...

The author provides a political economy interpretation of the rise and fall of public interest in price measurement, placing these developments in the context of the attempt by Congress and the White House to deal with growing deficits in the early to mid-1990s. He provides a detailed discussion...

This paper presents a new measure of underlying inflation: component-smoothed inflation. It approaches the problem of determining underlying inflation from a different direction than previous methods. Rather than excluding or trimming out volatile CPI items, it smoothes components of the CPI...

This paper uses data for Australia, the United States, Japan and the euro area to examine the relative performance of the headline CPI, exclusion-based ‘cores’, and trimmed means as measures of underlying inflation. Overall, we find that trimmed means tend to outperform headline and...

We report that the price of a 6.5oz Coke was 5¢ from 1886 until 1959. Thus, we are documenting a nominal price rigidity that lasted more than 70 years! The case of Coca-Cola is particularly interesting because during the 70-year period there were substantial changes in the soft drink industry...

We use store-level data to document the exact process of changing prices and to directly measure menu costs at five multi-store supermarket chains. We show that changing prices in these establishments is a complex process, requiring dozens of steps and a nontrivial amount of resources. The menu...

Deterministic simulations with the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s core FPS model show how New Zealand’s broad macroeconomic environment might have evolved over the 1990s, if a US nominal yield curve and US TWI exchange rate movements under a common currency arrangement had been...