Can food prices cause social unrest? Throughout history, riots have frequently broken out, ostensibly as a consequence of high food prices. Using monthly data at the international level, this paper studies the impact of food prices – both food price levels volatility – on social unrest. Because food prices and social unrest are jointly determined, data on natural disasters are used to identify ...

This paper uses monthly price indices of 448 items of manufacturing sector in 2004:4 to 2016:01, to study the effect of exchange rate and its volatilities on price setting behavior of manufacturing sectors. Given that, many manufacturing sectors in Iran need to import raw materials, intermediate and capital goods in their production process, it is expected that exchange rate variations affect p...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the evolution of relative prices of food groups and its influence on public healthy eating policies. METHODS Data from the municipality of Sao Paulo between 1939 and 2010 were analyzed based on calculating index numbers. Data from the Economic Researches Foundation Institute price database and weight structures (1939 to 1988) and from the Brazilian Institute of Geography ...

The measurement of house prices poses significant conceptual and practical problems, mainly because dwellings are heterogeneous assets whose prices can only be observed when they are sold. There are now seven main house price indices for the United Kingdom. In broad terms, each measures one of three different concepts: the value of a representative set of house transactions; the price of a hous...

In this paper the problem of modeling electricity price dynamics in deregulated energy markets is studied. Since the nature of customers' energy consumption, market participants' strategic behavior and the power system reliability indices are stochastic processes, the electricity price model will be stochastic as well. In our analysis the price of electricity is modeled based on the customers' ...

In an economy that proved to be highly sensitive to housing prices fluctuations it is at least intriguing why the U.S. has accurate housing price indices for the top 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) only. This is an important informational gap since in most the states, housing sales in Small Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) account for at least 30% of the total state sales. This p...

In this paper we propose the application of the original, superlative price index formula for the measurement of commodity substitution bias associated with Consumer Price Index (CPI). In our simulation study we compare CPI bias values calculated by using the original price index formula with those calculated on the basis of some known, superlative price indices.

We use a statistical model to estimate impulse responses of sectoral price indices to aggregate shocks and to sector-specific shocks. In the median sector, 100 percent of the long-run response of the sectoral price index to a sector-specific shock occurs in the month of the shock. The Calvo model and the sticky-information model match this finding only under extreme assumptions concerning the p...