Consumers are very responsive to sales, yet statistical agency practice typically under-weights sale prices in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Evidence is lacking on the impact on the representativeness of prices included in the CPI and on estimates of inflation. We use high-frequency scanner...

The treatment of owner-occupied housing (OOH) is probably the most important unresolved issue in inflation measurement. The European Union has been grappling with this problem for over a decade. We argue for measuring OOH costs using a particular version of the user cost method. We then compare...

This paper – which takes into consideration overall experience with the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as well as the improvements made to this measure of inflation since 2003 – finds that the HICP continues to fulfil the prerequisites for the index underlying the ECB’s...

Consumer price inflation, as measured by the year-on-year increase in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), is used by the European Central Bank (ECB) for assessing its monetary policy. The European Statistical System regularly introduces methodological improvements into this...

This paper studies monetary policy rules in a small open economy with Inflation Targeting, incomplete pass-through and rigid nominal wages. The paper shows that, when nominal wages are fully flexible and pass-through is low to moderate, the monetary authority should target the consumer price...

The pass-through from exchange rate changes to inflation differs depending on the underlying shock. This paper quantifies the conditional exchange rate pass-through (CERPT) to prices, i.e. the change in prices relative to that in the exchange rate following a certain exogenous shock, with a...

Aggregate exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) to import and consumer prices in the EU is currently lower than it was in the 1990s and is non-linear. Low estimated aggregate ERPT to consumer prices does not at all mean that exchange rate movements do not have an impact on inflation, as aggregate...

We study the fluctuations of exchange rates and consumer prices in two small open economies, Sweden and Canada, using a structural Bayesian VAR. Four domestic and two global shocks are identified through zero and sign restrictions. For both economies, we find that the main driver of consumer...

The removal of the lower bound on the EUR/CHF exchange rate in January 2015 provides a unique setting to study the implications of a large and sudden appreciation in an otherwise stable macroeconomic environment. Using transaction-level data on non-durable goods purchases by Swiss consumers, we...