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...

This paper provides an overview of statistical measurement issues relating to alternative measures of core inflation, and the criteria for choosing among them. The approaches to measurement considered include exclusion-based methods, imputation methods, limited influence estimators, reweighting,...

The Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) is the single most important indicator of inflation used by the European Central Bank. Sections 2 to 4 of the paper look at the theory of inflation indexes that could be used as target indexes of inflation. A Consumer Price Index (CPI) emerges as...

In order to provide information concerning the significant contributions to price index theory made by Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802-1896), this paper presents an account of his pioneering scientific achievements together with a synopsis of his personal and professional life. He was the first to...

Indexes often incorporate various biases due to their methods of construction. The Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) index can potentially eliminate substitution bias without needing current period expenditure data. The CES index requires an elasticity parameter. We derive a system of...

The use of multilateral indexes is increasingly an accepted approach for incorporating scanner data in a Consumer Price Index. The attractiveness stems from the ability to be able to control for chain drift bias. Consensus on two key issues has yet to be achieved: (i) the best multilateral...

Expert statistical opinion in the UK is increasingly moving towards the position that the Economic Approach to consumer price indices does not provide a reliable guide to the choice of aggregation formula. In particular, it does not, contrary to the advice in the ILO’s Consumer Price Index...

The UK’s Retail Prices Index (RPI) was established in 1956 and updated regularly since then, and up until 2004 it was the country’s only general consumer prices index. In that year the UK version of the European Union’s Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices was renamed the Consumer Prices...

This paper considers the problem of aggregation in the case of large linear dynamic panels, where each micro unit is potentially related to all other micro units, and where micro innovations are allowed to be cross sectionally dependent. Following Pesaran (2003), an optimal aggregate function is...

Official price indexes are usually calculated using matched samples of products. If products exhibit systematic price trends at different points in their life cycle then matched sample methods may introduce bias if the life cycle movement in the sample does not adequately reflect that in the...