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...

How much does quality adjustment matter in measuring consumer price inflation? To address this question, we use different sources of micro and macro price data for Germany and the euro area. For Germany, we find that quality adjustment applies to a large range of goods and services but, on...

Over the last three decades the supply of economic statistics has vastly improved. Unfortunately, statistics on regional price levels (sub-national purchasing power parities) have been exempt from this positive trend, even though they are indispensable for meaningful spatial comparisons of...

Spatial price comparisons rely to a high degree on the quality of the underlying price data that are collected within or across countries. Below the basic heading level, these price data often exhibit large gaps. Therefore, stochastic index number methods like the CPDmethod and the GEKS method...

In Germany, package holidays are an important driver of consumer prices. Several challenges arise when measuring the price development of these bundled travel and accommodation services, such as the quality of accommodation and the timing of booking. Statistical practices are currently based on...

A method is proposed to measure capital services in production. This means that productive assets are weighted according to their user costs. The user costs of the individual asset classes are estimated based on data from the national accounts and other sources. The results show that, in the...