The COVID-19 crisis had a major impact on the measurement of inflation around the world, as price observation in shops became impossible and some markets completely closed down. This article looks at the measures taken during the crisis in 2020 to ensure the continued compilation of the European...

Consumer price indices reflect changes through time in the prices of goods and services that are bought by households for the satisfaction of their consumption needs. In Greece, there are two different indicators of inflation issued by the National Statistical Service of Greece. The Consumer...

How much does quality adjustment matter in measuring consumer price inflation? To address this question, we use different sources of micro and macro price data for Germany and the euro area. For Germany, we find that quality adjustment applies to a large range of goods and services but, on...

The paper explores the extent to which products follow systematic pricing patterns over their life cycle and the impact this has on the measurement of inflation. Using a large US scanner data set on supermarket products and applying flexible regression methods, we find that on average prices...

Consumers are very responsive to sales, yet statistical agency practice typically under-weights sale prices in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), with some agencies excluding sale prices completely. Evidence is lacking on how this may impact on both the representativeness of prices included in the...

This study has adopted the actual household expenditure data from the national accountstoconstruct a true inflation rate (using the Fisher index) and found that the official inflationrateinthe 33 OECD countries was an overestimate of true inflation for 22 and underestimate in11countries in the...

The Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) co-exists with the national Consumer Price Index (CPI) as a key measure of inflation in Germany. Both indices are based on the same granular price data and uniform compilation methods at the lower levels of aggregation. However, differences arise at...

Textbooks of macroeconomics regularly remind their readers that they should not interpret the macroeconomic price variable as some sort of average price. Instead it represents some price index indicating the average of the individual items' price changes between the period considered and some...

The availability of large transaction level datasets, such as retail scanner data, provides a wealth of information on prices and quantities that national statistical institutes can use to produce more accurate, timely, measures of inflation. However, there is no universally agreed upon method...

Intuitively core inflation is understood as a measure of inflation where noisy price movements are avoided. This is typically achieved by either excluding or downplaying the importance of the most volatile items. However, some of those items show high persistence, and one certainly does not want...