This paper reviews the theory of the true cost of living index and its approximation through superlative index numbers, as well as the Vartia quantum theory of bias in index numbers as applied to substitution bias in consumer price indices. Estimated adjustments are proposed for the Argentine...

The results of purchasing power parity (PPP)-based comparisons of income across countries can be quite sensitive to the choice of index number formula. Tighter bounds on per capita income differentials can be constructed either by assuming homothetic preferences, or by estimating a demand...

The Boskin report (1996) concluded that the US consumer price index (CPI) overestimated the inflation by 1.1 percentage points. This was due to several measurement errors in the CPI. One of them is called quality change bias. We compare two methods in this paper which can be used to correct for...

This paper reviews alternative approaches to measuring an economy's cost competitiveness and proposes some new measures inspired by the economic theory of index numbers. The indices provide a theoretical benchmark for estimated real effective exchange rates, but differ from standard measures in...

In this paper we adopt a new approach to testing for purchasing power parity, PPP, that is robust to base country effects, cross-section dependence, and aggregation. Given data on N + 1 countries, i, j = 0, 1, 2, ..., N, the standard procedure is to apply unit root or stationarity tests to N...

This paper examines the persistent properties of 12 sectoral relative prices between Korea and Japan obtained following the Classification of Individual Consumption according to Purpose (COICOP) over the period of 1985-2016. Applying a new econometric method developed by Pesaran which controls...

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...

Cross-demand creates links between goods which cause demand-driven cross-price dependencies. We construct a theoretical model to analyze their role in propagating microeconomic price shocks to the CPI inflation rate and examine their empirical relevance using spatial econometric techniques. The...

Consumers access foreign goods by purchasing them domestically or shopping abroad. We present new facts on cross-border shopping by Swiss households showing, for example, that prices of identical products are lower in neighboring countries, cross-border shopping shares fall with distance to the...