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Report
On both sides of the quality bias in price indexes
It is often argued that price indexes do not fully capture the quality improvements of new goods in the market. Because of this shortcoming, price indexes are perceived to overestimate the actual price increases that occur. In this paper, I argue that the quality bias in price indexes is just as likely to be upward as it is to be downward. I show how both the sign and the magnitude of the quality bias in the most commonly applied price index methods are determined by the cross-sectional variation of prices per quality unit across the product models sold in the market. ; I do so by simulating ...
Journal Article
Solid performance marked by district publicly traded companies
Journal Article
Comparing apples and oranges
Tracking prices over time is easy when the object in question doesn't change much-say, an orange. But the process is difficult when there are frequent changes in the quality of the item-say, an Apple computer. Hedonics provides the solution.
Report
How rigid are producer prices?
Conventional wisdom suggests that producer prices are more rigid than consumer prices and therefore play less of a role in the allocation of goods and services. Analyzing 1987-2008 microdata collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the producer price index, we find that producer prices for finished goods and services in fact exhibit roughly the same rigidity as consumer prices that include sales and substantially less rigidity than consumer prices that exclude them. Moreover, large firms change prices two to three times more frequently than small firms do, and by smaller amounts, ...
Speech
Inflation measurement and price volatility
Remarks before the Charlotte Economics Club, Charlotte, N.C., October 4, 2007. ; "Those of us responsible for crafting U.S. monetary policy cannot afford to be distracted by the flux of short-term price changes that are destined to be unwound. Our eye should be focused on underlying inflationary pressures, some of which may indeed be coming from food and energy markets. Routinely excluding food and oil price movements from our inflation gauges may have made sense in the 1970s, the 1980s and even the 1990s--but not now, nor in the next few years."
Journal Article
The housing drag on core inflation
Some analysts have raised the question of whether the unprecedented declines in house values, which have been the hallmark of the recent recession, might be artificially dampening core inflation readings. However, a close examination of recent inflation data shows that the weakness in housing costs is representative of a broad pattern of subdued price increases across most consumption goods and services and is not distorting the broad downward trend in core inflation measures.
Speech
Introductory remarks to the Price Measurement for Monetary Policy Conference
Remarks given to a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Cleveland,> Dallas, Texas, May 24, 2007 ; "One of our main criticisms here at the Dallas Fed of much of the core inflation literature is that it lacks theoretical coherence. It reminds me of the time-honored saying that an economist is someone who sees something work in practice and then wonders if it can work in theory."
Report
The hitchhiker’s guide to missing import price changes and pass-through
A large body of empirical work has found that exchange rate movements have only modest effects on inflation. However, the response of an import price index to exchange rate movements may be underestimated because some import price changes are missed when constructing the index. We investigate downward biases that arise when items experiencing a price change are especially likely to exit or to enter the index. We show that, in theoretical pricing models, entry and exit have different implications for the timing and size of these biases. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics microdata, we derive ...
Journal Article
The Big Mac: a global-to-local look at pricing
The global, national, regional and local factors that shape price-setting behavior are complex, even for a relatively simple product that's neither easily tradable nor wholly nontradable.