An official website of the United States government
United States Department of Labor
United States Department of Labor
The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information,
make sure you're on a federal government site.
The site is secure.
The
https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any
information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.
Office of Survey Methods Research
SHARE ON:
More Information
Published Year: 2006
Survey/Program(s): General Methodology
Catalog: Statistical Survey Paper
Download PDF
Estimating Dynamic Price Indexes
Abstract
Standard price indexes fix on a set of goods, each very precisely specified as to what it is and where sold. Measurements of the change in price of each good are made, and these combined by formula to get an overall measure of change. In a "dynamic universe", goods disappear and new ones appear, making a fixed product index difficult to construct. In cross area indexes, in which we compare the overall prices of goods in one area to those in another, there may be no common specific goods available. In both cases, indexes are constructed using hedonic regression. In hedonic regression, prices are modeled on the properties of the goods, and the properties serve as the basis of comparison from one time period to the next or one area to another. We here investigate the behavior of dynamic price indexes compared to standard indexes, and of estimators of dynamic indexes based on samples.