How Much Do Official Price Indexes Tell Us about Inflation?

Jessie Handbury, Tsutomu Watanabe and David Weinstein

No 19504, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of how accurately the CPI informs us about "true" inflation. We use the largest price and quantity dataset ever employed in economics to build a Törnqvist inflation index for Japan between 1989 and 2010. Our comparison of this true inflation index with the CPI indicates that the CPI bias is not constant but depends on the level of inflation. We show the informativeness of the CPI rises with inflation. When measured inflation is low (less than 2.4% per year) the CPI is a poor predictor of true inflation even over 12-month periods. Outside this range, the CPI is a much better measure of inflation. We find that the U.S. PCE Deflator methodology is superior to the Japanese CPI methodology but still exhibits substantial measurement error and biases rendering it a problematic predictor of inflation in low inflation regimes as well.

JEL-codes: E01 E31 E5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-mon
Note: EFG ME
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Working Paper: How Much Do Official Price Indexes Tell Us About Inflation? (2014)
Working Paper: How Much Do Official Price Indexes Tell Us About Inflation? (2013)
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