Legislation enacted in 1972 introduced an automatic benefit increase provision into the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program of the United States.’ Present law calls for the adjustment of benefits for those already on the rolls to keep pace with inflation whenever the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rises by 3 percent or more from the first quarter of one year to the first qu...

The practice of making hedonic-based price adjustments to remove the effects of quality changes in goods and services that enter into the calculation of the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) has to date focused primarily on indexes for consumer electronics, appliances, housing, and apparel. In an effort to expand the use of hedonic adjustments to a service-oriented area of the CPI, this article i...

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...

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...