The recent surge in inflation, driven by spectacular increases in energy prices, has driven sharp falls in household living standards, huge government intervention to try to mitigate it, and serious policy headaches. As such it continues to be the backdrop behind many of the most pressing issues...

When faced with economic stagnation, innovation, product innovation in particular, is often cited as an effective stimulus because it is thought to encourage household consumption and lead to higher demand. Using a secular stagnation model with wealth preference, we examine the effects of...

Since early 2021, consumer price inflation has risen sharply across the advanced economies, including the US, the euro area and Denmark. We argue that the surge in inflation in the three economies in 2021-22 reflects multiple factors, including the Covid19 pandemic in 2020-21 and the Russian war...

The recent global increases in fuel prices threaten the gains in poverty reduction that countries like Paraguay have achieved over the past few decades. Therefore, policy makers must understand the potential distributional impacts of increases in fuel prices to evaluate the implementation of...

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...

The global rise in food commodity prices is passing through strongly to the consumer prices that households pay for these products. Further, the current episode has seen a more widespread increase in food items than other historical periods of stress in these markets. The results of an...

The aim of this study is to present the underlying methodology behind the estimation of the Adequate Living Expenses (ALE) Threshold for the Greek population. The ALE threshold was first introduced in 2014 by the Greek authorities as a benchmark, mainly for protecting overindebted mortgage...

The gap between the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Wholesale Price Index (WPI) is not always showing a definite trend. There are times when the gap between the indices is very high, and there are times when the gap is very low. This inconsistent relationship between the two indices is a cause of...

While two strands of the literature suggest that PPI inflation, in addition to or instead of CPI inflation, should be a targeting variable in a monetary policy rule, the distinction between the two is only important when they do not co-move strongly. Our first contribution is to document that...

The Consumer Price Index does not take into account the fact that consumers alter the composition of their purchases in response to changes in relative prices. This substitution effect will cause the CPI to grow faster than the cost of living. This paper presents new estimates showing that this...

This paper investigates the use of high-frequency scanner data to construct price indexes. In the presence of inventory behavior, purchases and consumption by individuals differ over time. Cost-of-living indexes can still be constructed using data on purchases. For weekly data on canned tuna,...

This paper provides a justification for hedonic price indices and details the properties of hedonic price functions. The analysis is done in a market setting in which a finite number of goods, each defined by its characteristics, interact. We note that proper hedonic indices can be constructed...

In this paper, we investigate several key problems in Japanese economic statistics. We use CPI mismeasurements and biases as an example to explore the roots of the problems and also to offer guidelines for improvements. We emphasize 3 major shortcomings shared by many official statistics in...

A number of analysts have claimed recently that the consumer price index overstates the annual increase in the cost of living. This paper develops a framework for studying measurement problems in the consumer price index and systematically analyzes the available evidence concerning the magnitude...

One of the greatest challenges facing official statistics in the 21st century is the use of alternative sources of data about prices (scanned and scraped data) in the analysis of price dynamics, which also involves selecting the appropriate formula of the price index at the elementary group...

This national case study will investigate recent inflationary developments in Croatia by combining quantitative analysis with a qualitative overview of policy making. It collects data regarding inflationary developments, wages and other key variables in Croatia's economy. The task of this study...

Germany has suffered an inflationary shock broadly commensurate with that of the Euro Area as a whole, with energy playing a slightly larger, food a somewhat smaller than average role. Because of differences in consumption patterns, the current inflationary surge hits low-income households...

This paper studies exchange rate pass-through to food and energy consumer price inflation and its dependence on the inflation environment using cross-country panel estimation of Phillips curves. It considers a large panel of OECD member and candidate economies with quarterly data from 1994 to...

We provide new evidence on price rigidity at the product level based on microdata underlying the Swiss consumer price index from 2008 to 2020. We find that the frequency of price changes has increased over the last decade, particularly among products where collection switched to online prices,...

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...

Like in other European countries, several supply shocks (bottlenecks related to the end of the pandemic, tensions in international gas and oil prices, and war in Ukraine) have led to a rise in the inflation rate in Spain since March 2021. This has been amplified by the functioning of energy...

Italian inflation has risen to 9.4% in September 2022. Energy goods have been the primary driver of the inflation surge since the fall of 2021, but price increases are now spreading to the whole economy, with 'core' inflation at 5.3%. Since Italy's industries heavily rely on gas as an energy...

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...

Hungary has a history of high inflation rates. After the transformation period inflation reached up to 35% in the early 1990ies. Since then, economic policy measures contributed to signifi-cantly lower inflation and during the mid-2010s it was even close to zero. Inflation rates have begun to...

Inflation in Austria started to rise from mid-2021 during recovery from the CORONA crisis. The Russian invasion in Ukraine and the heavy increases in energy prices made things worse and brought inflation to over 10%. The government did not enter direct formal negotiations with social partners...

Standard theory of consumer behavior stands on the maxim of utility maximization. Optimizing behavior of consumer is achieved by maximization of utility subject to budget constraint. An increase in inflation that is not accompanied by proportionate increase in income can leave a consumer worse...

We provide new evidence on price rigidity at the product level based on microdata underlying the Swiss consumer price index from 2008 to 2020. We find that the frequency o f price changes has increased over the last decade, particularly among products where collection switched to online prices,...

French consumer price inflation (as measured by the HICP) rose by 6.2% in September 2022 as compared to September 2021, against 10% in the euro area. Inflation rose less rapidly in France than in the euro area primarily due to a less rapid rise in energy prices: energy prices contributed to...