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Price and Index Number Research Home Page

Notices

The Division was created in 1963 in response to the Stigler Commission Report on Federal price statistics. It has had a long and successful history, both in providing economic consulting services to the Bureau and in serving as a source of, and conduit for, new ideas in the economics profession. The Division staff works on long term research, much of it towards resolving of price index measurement problems, using a wide range of methods from microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, consumer economics, industrial organization, econometrics, and statistics. The Division also provides consulting services to the production offices within the Office of Prices and Living Conditions: Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE); Consumer Price Index (CPI); Producer Price Index (PPI); Import/Export Price Indexes (MXP).

DPINR Research Products:

  1. Research Disease-Based Price Indexes (R-DBPI)
  2. Research Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) Thresholds
  3. Research New Tenant Rent Index

Current research includes:

  • Developing methods to quality adjust medical prices
  • Evaluating the use of medical claims data as an alternative source of medical prices
  • Evaluating the measurement of health insurance prices
  • Redesigning indexes to utilize newly available corporate transaction data aggregators (e.g., JD Power Vehicles Data)
  • Development of automatizing data collection methods for price index programs
  • Developing quality adjustment methods with machine learning algorithms
  • Measuring the impact of formula assumptions for the CPI
  • Evaluating models of nonhomothetic demand underlying heterogeneous exact price index formulas
  • Developing new methods for computing a cost-of-living index
  • Developing housing price indexes accounting for neighborhood quality
  • Analyzing pricing zones and spatial price discrimination
  • Evaluating methods to incorporate surplus gains from variety into price index formulas
  • Evaluating methods of estimating the elasticity of demand between goods
  • Evaluating methods of measuring the consumer benefit of new goods
  • Constructing an improved historical CPI
  • Accounting for in-kind benefits in expenditure-based poverty thresholds
  • Developing method for distributing total factor productivity among production factors
  • Investigating estimation problems that can be solved using estimated multivariate time-series models

 

Last Modified Date: November 22, 2023