Using the Retail Distribution of Sellers to Impute Expenditures Shares / Alexis Antoniades, Robert C. Feenstra, Mingzhi Xu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Antoniades, Alexis.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Feenstra, Robert C.

Xu, Mingzhi.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28902.

NBER working paper series no. w28902

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on the share of outlets selling an item, or the share of outlets adjusted by the total number of items sold in each. Relative to using no weights, we find that using such imputed weights substantially reduces bias in the frequency of price changes, in annual inflation, and in price comparisons across countries.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2021.