This article presents new estimates of the cost of living and real wages in the agriculture from 1781 to 1936 in Southern Navarre. The typology of wages includes male labourers, female labourers and servants. The calculated indexes suggest that the rural standard of living increased after the...

The increasing availability of geospatial data (i.e., exact longitudes and latitudes for each house) has the potential to improve the quality of house price indexes. It is not clear though how best to use this information. We show how geospatial data can be included as a nonparametric spline...

This report presents the research initiative to explore an alternative methodology for extrapolating purchasing power parities (PPPs) for 21 participating economies in the Asia and Pacific region. The 2009 PPP Update provides an intermediate benchmark and more firmly based real expenditures and...

Globalisation with all its features can be divided in two segments - good and bad. When we look at the good side of globalisation, it is obvious that it has erased boundaries between countries in terms of trade, education, knowledge sharing, and other new technologies, while on the other hand,...

A rather simple but crucial question in economics and management is why one firm makes more profit than another. However the answer remains unclear because of the large range of factors that might explain differential profit. In this paper we propose a decomposition of the profit differential...

When French economists read The Purchasing Power of Money, they were primarily interested in the equation of exchange and the reformulation that Fisher proposed regarding the quantity theory of money. This reading led them to ponder the meaning that should be given to this theory and to study...

In empirical economic research, individual prices are often aggregated into average prices of sub-aggregates. Then, these average prices are aggregated to produce the average price of the total aggregate. Often, such two stage procedures help to illuminate the underlying forces driving the...

This paper shows that any method for constructing a poice index has an underlying spanning tree. Using this insight, the debate over the relative merits of fixed base and chained price indices reduces to a debate over two alternative spanning trees.

The traditional CPI measure has many drawbacks, when used for very different purposes, and it is not at all surprising that a great deal of work has been devoted to its improvement. Besides seasonal adjustment, various other techniques have been developed to find the “core” inflation index....

This paper estimates a common component in many price series that has an equiproportional effect on all prices. Changes in this component can be interpreted as changes in the value of the numeraire since, by definition, they leave all relative prices unchanged. The first aim of the paper is to...