Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of how accurately the CPI informs us about "true"...

Is the cross-sectional distribution of house prices close to a (log)normal distribution, as is often assumed in empirical studies on house price indexes? How does it evolve over time? How does it look like during the period of housing bubbles? To address these questions, we investigate the...