Household scanner data contain rich information on household demographics and transactions in actual markets over a long time period. To more fully understand the characteristics of these data, we conducted an analysis to determine whether household expenditures in the Nielsen Homescan panel are...

Hausman (2003) discusses four sources of bias in the present calculation of the CPI. A pure price' index based approach of surveying prices as done by the BLS cannot succeed in solving the problems of bias. We discuss economic and econometric approaches to measuring the first order bias effects...

A common approach to measuring price changes is to look at the change of the expenditure needed to purchase a fixed basket of goods. It is well-known that this approach suffers from problems and creates several biases in the measurement of price changes faced by consumers. Substitution and...

We use Nielsen Homescan data to examine who bears the economic burden of cigarette taxes. We find cigarette taxes are less than fully passed through to consumer prices, suggesting consumers and producers split the excess burden of these taxes. Using information on consumer location, we show the...

We report results from a validation study of Nielsen Homescan data. We use data from a large grocery chain to match thousands of individual transactions that were recorded by both the retailer (at the store) and the Nielsen Homescan panelist (athome). First, we report how often shopping trips...

This paper explores the definitions and properties of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) indexes, focusing especially on the Paasche, Laspeyres, Fisher, Tornqvist, and implicit Tornqvist ones. These indexes can be evaluated from observable price and quantity data, and certain of these are...

In the early 1990s, observers of the labour market often pointed to emerging new phenomena. How many of these trends have survived the strong economic expansion of 1997 to 1999? The rise of self-employment, which was thought to result from a decline in full-time paid employment, has continued...