In booms, households substitute luxuries for necessities, e.g., food away from home for food at home. This cyclical pattern of composition changes in the consumption basket has the potential to reduce the volatility of measures of the labor-market wedge, the gap between the marginal rate of...

Income growth in emerging economies has often been cited as a key driver of the past decade?s com-modity price boom?the longest and broadest boom since World War II. This paper shows that income has a negative and highly significant effect on real food commodity prices, a finding that is...

Many developing countries lack spatially disaggregated price data. Some analysts use "no-price" methods by using a food Engel curve to derive the deflator as that needed for nominally similar households to have equal food shares in all regions and time periods. This method cannot be tested in...

This paper proposes a method of estimating spatial bilateral price index numbers from cross-section consumer expenditure data on different items using Engel curve analysis. A simple technique is developed by which it is possible to find a method for estimating a set of consumer price index...

In booms, households substitute luxuries for necessities, e.g., food away from home for food at home. Ignoring this cyclical pattern of composition changes in the consumption basket makes the labor-market wedge -- a measure of inefficiency that reflects the gap between the marginal rate of...