In 1996 the Boskin report (1996) discussed several types of measurement errors in the consumer price index (CPI). The CPI measures the cost of purchasing a ...xed market basket of goods and services. All the goods and services in this basket can be divided over classi...cation levels beginning with major groups like food and beverages, housing, transportation, etc. The CPI calculates the monthl...

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a representative market basket of consumer goods and services. The CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) represents the spending habits of about 87 percent of the population of the United States. The CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), a subset of the CPI-U populatio...

The analysis presented in this report was undertaken to identify those drug entities that account for a significant proportion of the retail expenditures for prescription drugs used by the elderly. Commercial data bases were used to develop fixed weight Laspeyres price indexes based specifically on drugs used in the elderly population. The indexes provide the capability to analyze price trends ...

Interest in the measurement of infl ation has increased signifi cantly in recent years for a number of reasons. First, infl ation rates have fallen signifi cantly since the early 1980s. Second, many central banks have adopted infl ation targets. The combination of these two factors has increased the importance of accurate measurement. Third, rapid quality improvements, particularly in the infor...

nterest in commodity prices as indicators of consumer price inflation has ebbed and flowed with the rise and fall in commodity prices themselves. True to form, as commodity prices have surged in the last two years (Chart 1), interest in their predictive power has returned. Inflation hawks point to an outpouring of studies in the late 1980s showing a strong empirical connection between commodity...

The United States has been increasing the import of wooden bedroom furniture from the world to meet its domestic needs. Traditional suppliers have been substituted by developing countries such as China and Vietnam over the past decade. To explain this market structure change, a dynamic Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) was employed to analyze this import market. Monthly import data of the top s...

The present paper integrates neoclassical offer curves and production theory, introducing utility maximization and trade levels into the comparative static factor proportions model. The paper analyzes production conditions that determine the Metzler paradox that a tariff could lower the tariff inclusive import price. The model provides a more complete link between neoclassical and factor propor...

We extend the trade model with firm heterogeneity developed by Melitz and Ottaviano (2008), incorporating domestic and imported intermediate goods, in order to investigate the impact of import barriers on final and intermediate goods on firms’ decisions to produce and to export. Our main contribution is to disentangle the channels through which these trade policies work. When variable trade cos...

U sing daily data, this study examined asymmetric pass-through of Iran’s oil price to banking stock index in Tehran Stock Exchange at different time horizons. Based on the results, the coefficient of long-run pass-through of oil price to banking stock index was estimated to be 0.63. Furthermore, based on the short-term ARDL-CECM models, the relationship between the positive component...