The paper explores the extent to which products follow systematic pricing patterns over their life cycle and the impact this has on the measurement of inflation. Using a large US scanner data set on supermarket products and applying flexible regression methods, we find that on average prices...

The paper explores the extent to which products follow systematic pricing patterns over their life cycle and the impact this has on the measurement of inflation. Using a large US scanner data set on supermarket products and applying exible regression methods, we find that on average prices...

Disequilibrium in the housing market can be detected by comparing the actual price-rent ratio with its equilibrium counterpart obtained from the user-cost condition. Empirical implementation of this idea, however, is problematic because of quality differences between sold and rented dwellings....

Consumers are very responsive to sales, yet statistical agency practice typically under-weights sale prices in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), with some agencies excluding sale prices completely. Evidence is lacking on how this may impact on both the representativeness of prices included in the...

Departures of the housing market from equilibrium can be detected by comparing the actual price-rent ratio with the user cost of owner occupying. Empirical implementation of this idea, however, is problematic for two reasons. First, the price-rent ratio needs to be quality adjusted. Second, the...

The International Comparisons Program (ICP) run by the World Bank compares the purchasing power of currencies and real income across countries. Using a unique data set consisting of over 600,000 ICP price quotes drawn from nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region, we consider a number of ways...

Departures of the housing market from equilibrium can be detected by comparing the actual price-rent ratio with the user cost of owner occupying. Empirical implementation of this idea, however, is problematic for two reasons. First, the price-rent ratio needs to be quality adjusted. Second, the...

We propose a flexible hedonic methodology for computing house price indexes that uses multiple imputation (MI) to account for missing data (a huge problem in housing data sets). Ours is the first study to use MI in this context. We also allow for spatial correlation, include interaction terms...

type="main" <p>The returns to housing are particularly important because this asset class makes up such a large fraction of household wealth. Yet they are not straightforward to calculate given both the heterogeneity in homes and the fact they sell only infrequently. We outline a methodology for...</p>