RECENT economic developments have aroused substantial interest in the treatment in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) of the cost of shelter for homeowners.' From December 1977, when the latest version of the CPI was introduced, until December 1980, the all-items CPI increased at an average annual rate of 11.6%, while the homeownership component increased at an average annual rate of 16.2%. Relativ...

The consumer price index (CPI) is usually computed as a fixed-weighted Laspeyres price index, with the weights updated at discrete intervals only. It is well known that the Laspeyres functional form entails a substitution bias. One way to reduce it would be to use chained indices, and superlative ones if possible. Unfortunately, the necessary data are often missing. This paper proposes a simple...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Adjusted for inflation, household income has been relatively flat since the mid-1990s, but the inflation rate of employer-sponsored health insurance has been greater than both household income growth and general inflation for 50 years. We estimated the effect on average family income if health insurance inflation matched the general inflation rate since 1996, and those...

Inclusion of nontraded goods prices has been shown to be partly responsible for slow convergence in price indices across major cities in the United States (Cecchetti et al 2002). Drawing upon insights provided by well known theories, this paper uses panel econometric methods to seek evidence in U.S. city level Consumer Price Index (CPI) data of a systematic long-run relationship between prices ...

Since 1993, the conduct of monetary policy in Australia has been based on an inflation target. Under this framework, the aim of policy is for underlying inflation to average 2 to 3 per cent per annum in the medium term. Underlying inflation can be measured in a number of ways but each of these measures shows that the target has been achieved so far in the 1990s (see Table 1). The concept of und...

This paper investigates the e¤ects of replacing the consumer price index (CPI) with the wholesale price index (WPI) in the cointegrating international parity relationships found by Juselius and MacDonald (2000). Our empirical analysis outstandingly produced results similar to the ones obtained by Juselius and MacDonald, suggesting that the cointegration relationships in the international parity...

OBJECTIVE To describe the evolution of cigarettes' real price and affordability during the last decade in Argentina. METHODS To analyze the real price of cigarettes, the weighted average monthly price of a pack of 20 cigarettes was divided by the consumer price index (CPI) from 2004 to 2014. The relative income price (RIP) was evaluated for the same period, defining RIP as the percentage of t...

the purpose of this study is to examine the dynamic effects of some macroeconomic variables: money stock, gross domestic product, consumer price index and exchange rates on determining housing price index behavior in iran using the error correction model. using seasonal data, the model is estimated by johansen-juselius cointegration approach during 1990-2007. the results reveal that all variabl...

Price indices are constructed to represent a population by using a sample of household expenditure information as weights. This expenditure information must be aggregated across households. In most cases, including the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI), the aggregation method used corresponds to a plutocratic index. Other types of aggregation, such as the democratic index, are also possible, and,...