The present paper shows that product-specific regional price dispersion usually causes the Country-Product-Dummy (CPD) method to be biased. In cases where it is not, this index number method is still inefficient and inference is invalid. In view of this, a nonlinear generalization of the CPD...

The shifts in household consumption caused by the coronavirus pandemic affect inflation measurement in the euro area via the updating of product weights. We propose a decomposition of the inflation rate, measured by the annual percentage change of the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP),...

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

The COVID-19 Pandemic has led to changes in expenditure patterns that can introduce significant bias in the measurement of Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation. I use publicly-available data on credit and debit card transactions to update the official CPI weights and re-calculate inflation with...

There have been important methodological changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) over time. These distort comparisons of inflation from different periods, which have become more prevalent as inflation has risen to 40-year highs. To better contextualize the current run-up in inflation, this...

COVID-19 changed consumers' spending patterns, making the CPI weights suddenly obsolete. In most regions, adjusting the CPI weights to account for the changes in spending patterns increases the estimate of inflation over the early months of the pandemic. Under-weighting of rising food prices and...

The Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) currently only includes rentals for housing (paid by tenants) and auxiliary housing expenditures (paid by both tenants and owners). The inclusion of an item for owner-occupied housing (OOH) would be desirable for both representativeness and...

We examine the consumer price inflation experiences of Australian households across the income distribution using Australian Bureau of Statistics data and prices and methodology from the national consumer price index. Across the period 2011 – 2018, we find that the lowest income households...