Background: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the main indicator for determining the prices level of a certain economy. The above-mentioned rate refers to the average prices on an indicated period and it is calculated mainly on goods consumed basis by selected families through weighting criteria...

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...

Prices collection for consumer price indices (CPI) compilation has come a long way in the past 20 years. While ideally, the index should include expenditure made by all households, urban and rural, throughout the country, usually CPIs in various countries had limited geographic coverage both for...

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...

This study investigates the role of sectoral market structure in the inflationary dynamics of the domestic producer prices (D-PPI) in Türkiye. We start by reporting the fact that industries with intense competition had lower producer price inflation compared to industries with low-competition...

The standard measure of core or underlying inflation is the inflation rate excluding food and energy prices. This paper constructs an alternative measure, the weighted median inflation rate, for 38 advanced and emerging economies using subclass level disaggretion of the CPI over 1990-2021, and...

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...

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...

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...

Cross-demand creates links between goods which cause demand-driven cross-price dependencies. We construct a theoretical model to analyze their role in propagating microeconomic price shocks to the CPI inflation rate and examine their empirical relevance using spatial econometric techniques. The...

This Staff Memo considers some of the available evidence on relative price shocks as a driver of Norwegian inflation dynamics in high- versus low-inflation regimes. The results suggest that relative price shocks have largely been transient over the past two-three decades. However, this has been...

This paper documents five stylised facts relating to price adjustment in the euro area, using various micro price datasets collected in a period with relatively low and stable inflation. First, price changes are infrequent in the core sectors. On average, 12% of consumer prices change each...

E-commerce has become more prevalent throughout Europe in the last decade. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic accelerated this trend, particularly in the retail sector. This paper focuses on the implications of increasing business-to-consumer ecommerce for prices and inflation in the euro area....

Purpose - This paper investigates the relationship between domestic gold prices and inflation in Vietnam based on the monthly series of the gold price index and consumer price index over the period of December 2001-July 2020. Design/methodology/approach - The co-integration between the domestic...

Inflation affects the purchasing power of households. This paper documents large, idiosyncratic inflation differences between households in their everyday shopping. Low-income households have experienced higher inflation in the last ten years, but the difference for richer households has been...

We examine the pass-through from producer to consumer prices, using product-group data derived from the microdata underlying the official Swedish PPI and CPI indices. We find a robust pass-through, in line with theoretical models emphasizing production inter-linkages between sectors. The results...

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...

This paper provides an extensive literature review and analyses some open issues in the measurement of inflation that can only be explored in depth using micro price data. It builds on the analysis done in the context of the ECB's strategy review, which pointed at directions for improvement of...

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused a deep recession globally, as well as in the euro area, accompanied by a steep decline in inflation rates in 2020. This paper reviews some of the main challenges created by the pandemic for inflation measurement and provides micro price data analysis of...

Die Krisen der letzten Jahre - allen voran die Corona-Pandemie - haben die Messung der Inflationsrate vor neue Herausforderungen gestellt. Dies betraf auch die Gütergruppe Pauschalreisen. Zum Beispiel wurden in den Jahren 2020 und 2021 viele Reisen angeboten, bei denen unklar war, ob sie trotz...

Global commodity prices spikes can have strong macroeconomic effects, par- ticularly in developing countries. This paper estimates the global commodity prices pass-through to consumer price inflation in Africa. Our sample includes monthly data for 48 countries over the period 2002m02-2021m04. We...

Die Krisen der letzten Jahre – allen voran die Corona-Pandemie – haben die Messung der Inflationsrate vor neue Herausforderungen gestellt. Dies betraf auch die Gütergruppe Pauschalreisen. Zum Beispiel wurden in den Jahren 2020 und 2021 viele Reisen angeboten, bei denen unklar war, ob sie...

RationaleFood prices have lately grown at rates unprecedented in recent decades. A detailed comparative analysis of these developments and their determinants from an international perspective is therefore interesting, focusing especially on dairy and cereals, given their high weight in the...

Shelter (housing) costs constitute a large component of price indexes, including 42 percent of the widely followed core Consumer Price Index (CPI). The shelter prices measured in the CPI capture new and existing renters and tend to lag market rents. This lag explains how in recent months the...

The frequencies at which prices and wages are adjusted, interpreted as price and wage flexibility, are key elements in workhorse models used for policy analysis. Yet, there is little evidence regarding the relationship between these two sources of nominal rigidities. This paper studies whether...

We examine the relationship between customer wait times and future price inflation using cell- phone location data. We focus our analysis on restaurants in the U.S. over the years 2019–2021 and document a stark increase in abnormal wait times starting in mid-2020. At the MSA level, we find...