Our research takes an exhaustive approach to measurement issues in price index construction for the BLS airfare index. We pursue a number of the objectives for dealing with the biases that the 1997 CPI Commission recommended and detail a protocol for data collection and analysis that can be...

The average price of treating a colorectal cancer patient with chemotherapy increased from about $100 in 1993 to $36,000 in 2005, due largely to the approval and widespread use of five new drugs between 1996 and 2004. We examine whether the substantial increase in spending has been worth it....

It is often argued that price indexes do not fully capture the quality improvements of new goods in the market. Because of this shortcoming, price indexes are perceived to overestimate the actual price increases that occur. In this paper, I argue that the quality bias in price indexes is just as...

Statistical offices try to match item models when measuring inflation between two periods. For product areas with a high turnover of differentiated models, however, the use of hedonic indexes is more appropriate since they include the prices and quantities of unmatched new and old models. The...

Changes in product characteristics on the extensive margin are an important and hitherto neglected dimension of quality change. Standard techniques for quality-adjusting price indices cannot handle such changes satisfactorily, which leads to an economically and statistically significant bias in...

Prior to the 1960s most American economists rejected hedonic techniques as a solution to the problem of quality change in price indexes. I argue that behind that judgment lay a deeper conceptual divide over how best to define and assess product quality: through expert testing or through market...

Economists have noted for decades that Consumer Price Index (CPI) in the developed countries is overstating inflation by 0,5-2,0% per year. A significant part of this bias is found to be caused by the effects of new goods and quality change. Information and communication technology (ICT)...