The Cost of Living with the RPI: Substitution Bias in the UK Retail Prices Index

Laura Blow

27 citations0/0 files storedThe Economic Journal

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Monetary Policy and Economic Impact Income, Poverty, and Inequality Economics of Agriculture and Food Markets

Abstract

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound the true cost-of-living index which corresponds most closely to the UK Retail Prices Index (RPI). This is used to assess the RPI formula for substitution bias. We show that neither the direction nor the existence of bias in the RPI forumla can be established on a priori theoretical grounds. However, we find empirical evidence of a variable, but generally positive bias in the rate of inflation recorded by the RPI formula.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

References

1976Exact and superlative index numbers 1982The Nonparametric Approach to Demand Analysis 1981Economics and Consumer Behaviour.1993What do we Learn About Consumer Demand Patterns from Micro Data 1939The Problem of the True Index of the Cost of Living 1983Non-Parametric Tests of Consumer Behaviour 1978Duality approaches to microeconomic theory 2003Nonparametric Engel Curves and Revealed Preference

Cited by

2007Inflation Bias after the Euro: Evidence from the UK and Italy 2002Measurement Error in the Consumer Price Index: Where Do We Stand?

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.