The “Great Recession” has painfully demonstrated the impact of real estate prices on real economic activity. Hence, close examination of real estate price changes is important for business cycle analysis and economic policy. However, most real estate price indices for Germany either exhibit...

Economists have been noting for decades that Consumer Price Index (CPI) in the developed countries is overstating inflation by 0,5−2,0% per year. A significant part of the bias is due to the presence of technology products and differentiated products in the CPI basket. An increase share of...

Hedonic methods are a prominent approach in the construction of quality-adjusted price indexes. This paper shows that the process of computing such indexes is substantially simplified if arithmetic (geometric) price indexes are computed based on exponential (log-linear) hedonic functions...

Die übliche Schätzfunktion zur Bestimmung der relativen Lohndifferenz mittels Dummyvariable in einer log-linearen Regressionsfunktion ist inkonsistent, falls gruppenspezifische Heteroskedastie vorliegt. Die Richtung und Größenordnung der Verzerrung wird abgeleitet. Ein Fallbeispiel zur...

Two distribution free estimators are proposed to estimate the mean of a dependent variable after fitting a semiparametric two-part heteroscedastic regression model to a transformation of the dependent variable. We show that the proposed estimators are consistent and have asymptotic normal...

Questions about monetary variables (such as income, wealth or savings) are key components of questionnaires on household finances. However, missing information on such sensitive topics is a well-known phenomenon which can seriously bias any inference based only on complete-case analysis. Many...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of quality adjusted prices for servers motivated by two facts. First, the productivity acceleration in the US economy since the mid 1990s is closely linked to spread of information technology of which networked computing is a large component. Second,...

This paper analyzes the construction of price indexes for condominiums and single family houses in Switzerland over the period 1985 to 2004 using the indirect method. We find, that the pooling of the data, i.e. direct indexes with fixed hedonic prices, are good models for average roperties but...