We propose a new approach which helps to shed light on the importance of the relationship between a government's welfare outcome and its citizens' desired well-being, defining a concept of "welfare gap". To determine this gap, we build two composite indices of well-being measured at the...

This paper introduces a new approach for studying behaviour in information networks. Index number theory, which has been developed in the context of comparing income and prices across countries, regions or over time, is used to derive indexes of information consumption. In particular, we...

Consumption baskets vary across households and inflation rates vary across goods. As a result, standard consumer price index (CPI) inflation may provide a misleading measure of the inflation actually faced by poor households, more so the more unequal the distribution of aggregate consumption...

Some economists argue antitrust policy should be based on empirical methods used by the Industrial Organization subdiscipline of economics, but non-economists must understand that those methods contain certain highly restrictive assumptions. Those assumptions involve econometric...

In this study, we analyze the effects of seasonal fluctuations on the aggregated price and quantity of goods in Japan. By analyzing monthly commodity-level data used to calculate Japan’s official Consumer Price Index, we demonstrate that a significant number of fresh foods are non-homogeneous...

Household surveys frequently record only expenditure information. The lack of information about quantities purchased precludes the possibility of deriving household specific unit values. The aggregate price indexes derived from sources exogenous to the household survey are often not sufficient...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

Despite the intensive efforts made by economists to examine regional income inequality in China, limited attention has been paid to disentangle the contribution of regional price differentials. This paper examines regional price differential in urban China over the period 1986 to 2001. Spatial...

Four sources of bias in the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) have been identified. The most discussed is substitution bias, which creates a second order bias in the CPI. Three other changes besides prices changes create first order effects on a correctly measured cost of living index (COLI). (1)...

Despite the intensive efforts made by economists to examine regional income inequality in China, limited attention has been paid to disentangle the contribution of regional price differentials. This paper examines regional price differential in urban China over the period 1986 to 2001. Spatial...