OBJECTIVE To provide guidance on selecting the most appropriate price index for adjusting health expenditures or costs for inflation. DATA SOURCES Major price index series produced by federal statistical agencies. STUDY DESIGN We compare the key characteristics of each index and develop suggestions on specific indexes to use in many common situations and general guidance in others. DATA C...

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) attempts to answer the question of how much more (or less) income does a consumer require to be as well off in period 1 as in period given changes in prices, changes in the quality of goods, and the introduction of new goods (or the disappearance of existing goods). The CPI has not attempted to estimate the effect of the introduction of new goods, despite the reco...

Accurate Measuring of poverty and its distribution in various areas, in addition to being crucial for cognitive purposes, could have different policy implications and affect policy assessments. The Household expenditures criteria is typically used to measure poverty, and poverty is often assessed using a poverty line and alternative indices. A major difficulty associated with this method is, ho...

It is a great honor to have this opportunity to speak to you today about Japan's current monetary policy. With the aim of achieving its 2 percent price stability target, the Bank of Japan (hereafter the Bank) adopted quantitative and qualitative monetary easing (QQE) in April 2013. QQE was expanded further in October 2014. This was because of the potential risk that a decline in the consumer pr...

In this paper, we construct a seasonally-adjusted price index for prepackaged software using detailed and comprehensive scanner data from the NPD Group. We document a large sales surge over the winter-holiday and claim that this seasonality is being driven by consumer heterogeneity. We introduce a novel approach for constructing the software component of the cost-of-living price index which exp...