The prices of commodities produced in Canada have important implications for the performance of the Canadian economy and the conduct of monetary policy. The authors explain an important change to the methodology used to construct the Bank of Canada commodity price index (BCPI). Since its...

Studies conducted in the United States came to the conclusion that the annual average inflationary rate of 3 percent measured during the interval beginning in the early 1990s through the mid-1990s overestimates by 1.1 percentage points the changes in the cost of living. As a result, throughout...

The popular Calvo model with indexation (Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans, 2005) and sticky information (Mankiw and Reis, 2002) model have guided much of the monetary policy discussion. The strength of these approaches is that they can explain the persistence of inflation. However, both of these...

In this paper, we examine the stochastic structure of a consumer price index and its inflation that ultimately provides the basis for monetary policy and other contracting fulfillments. The index is the broad monthly consumer price index, IPC-A of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and...

We document the presence of both small and large price changes in individual price records from the CPI in France and the US. After correcting for measurement error and cross-section heterogeneity, the size-distribution of price changes has a positive excess kurtosis. We propose an analytical...

We use a detailed micro dataset on product availability to construct a direct high frequency measure of consumer product shortages during the 2020-21 pandemic. We document a widespread multi-fold rise in shortages in nearly all sectors early in the pandemic. Over time, the composition of...

We provide an updated evaluation of the value of various measures of core inflation that could be used in the conduct of monetary policy. We find that the Bank of Canada's current preferred measures of core inflation-CPI-trim, CPI-median and CPI-common-continue to outperform alternative core...

Mismeasurement of inflation is likely to be more severe in a transition economy than in a more stable environment. Comparisons of self-reported changes in economic welfare with changes in incomes suggest that official Romanian inflation measures may be overstated by between 100 and 300 percent...

The paper investigates the relationship between relative price movements and changes in the aggregate price level using monthly data on Finland's Consumer Price Index and its components from the period covering the past eight and a half years. This was a period of very low inflation. The rate of...