Ordinary consumer price indices customarily overstate increases in the cost of living because they do not allow for consumer substitution as relative prices change. This study looks for a more accurate measure of variations in the cost of living in Argentina over the years 1960 to 1995, taking...

This paper studies how the depreciation of sterling following the Brexit referendum affected consumer prices in the United Kingdom. Our identification strategy uses input-output linkages to account for heterogeneity in exposure to import costs across product groups. We show that, after the...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson effect in 9 CEECs. Using panel cointegration techniques, we find strong empirical evidence in favour of what we call the internal transmission mechanism since productivity growth in the open sector is found to bring about non-tradable inflation. However,...

This paper studies the Balassa-Samuelson effect in nine Central and East European countries. Using panel cointegration techniques, we find that productivity growth in the open sector leads to inflation in non-tradable goods. Because of the low share of non-tradables and the high share of food...

Lacking data on price levels across locations, economists are forced to proxy them. One method is to extrapolate the price levels known for locations in some point in time to another point by multiplying the initial price levels by the local CPIs. With the use of simulation experiments, this...

We explore deviations from short-run purchasing power parity across European cities, attempting to move beyond a "first generation" of papers that document very large border effects. We document two very distinct types of border effects embedded in relative prices. The first is a "real barriers...

Although the long-run purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis is expected to hold across tradable goods, all price indices available to researchers for testing the validity of PPP contain some proportion of non-tradable goods prices, which may generate substantial persistence in the real...

The inequality growth during the last quarter century is explained as caused by a decreasing labor-labor exchange rate, i.e. devaluation of one's labor in exchange for other's labor embodied in the commodities affordable for one's earnings. We show that the productivity growth allows employers...

Purchasing power adjusted incomes applied in cross-country comparisons are measured with bias. In this paper, we estimate the purchasing power parity (PPP) bias in Penn World Table incomes and provide corrected real incomes. The bias is substantial and systematic: the poorer is a country, the...