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 show that a "competing claims" model of imperfect competition can explain the movements of wages and prices in the United Kingdom, using quarterly data covering 1976-93. We argue that careful attention both to economic theory and to the interaction between dynamics and identification is...

The authors analyse price convergence in new EU countries. They estimate the price level elasticity with respect to the GDP in PPP to be 0.7–0.9 percent. They also analyse additional sources of price level convergence, such as terms-of-trade changes or price deregulation. The average speed of...

The paper investigates the relationship between relative price movements and changes in the aggregate price level using monthly data on Finland’s Consumer Price Index and its components from the period covering the past eight and a half years. This was a period of very low inflation. The rate...