Summary In 2002, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) introduced a supplemental C-CPI-U employing a superlative formula to provide a closer approximation to a cost-of-living index (COLI). This paper focuses on whether the BLS can improve upon the headline CPI-U’s current biennial weight...

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...

Production capital and technology (i.e., total factor productivity) in U.S. manufacturing are fundamental for understanding output and productivity growth of the U.S. economy but are unobserved at this level of aggregation and must be estimated before being used in empirical analysis....

In 2002, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) introduced a supplemental C-CPI-U employing a superlative formula to provide a closer approximation to a cost-of-living index (COLI). This paper focuses on whether the BLS can improve upon the headline CPI-U’s current biennial weight update...