"The acceleration of productivity growth during the latter half of the 1990s was both the defining economic event of the decade and a major topic of debate among Federal Reserve policymakers. A key aspect of the debate was the conflict between incoming aggregate data, which initially suggested...

Recently, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has developed the Regional Price Parities (RPPs), spatial price indexes that allow for comparison of cost of living differences across various geographic areas. By construction, RPPs compare the average price level for a region with the national...