IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ijc/ijcjou/y2026q1a6.html

Estimating the Impact of Quality Adjustment on Consumer Price Inflation

Author

Listed:
  • Jan-Oliver Menz

    (Deutsche Bundesbank)

  • Elisabeth Wieland

    (Deutsche Bundesbank)

  • Günter W. Beck

    (University of Siegen and Miggroprices)

Abstract

How important is quality adjustment in measuring consumer price inflation? Not so much when looking at German CPI microprice data, although our data set lacks some products that are typically adjusted for quality changes. In the euro area, we show that the use of heterogeneous quality adjustment practices across member states has a big impact on cross-country inflation differentials and distorts the level of inflation. Using scanner data for consumer and household electronics, we find that cross-country inflation differentials may be overestimated by about 0.5 percentage points, and the euro-area (Big Five) inflation rate may be overestimated by about 0.3 percentage points.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan-Oliver Menz & Elisabeth Wieland & Günter W. Beck, 2026. "Estimating the Impact of Quality Adjustment on Consumer Price Inflation," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 22(1), pages 253-311, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:ijc:ijcjou:y:2026:q:1:a:6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ijcb.org/journal/v22n1/estimating-impact-quality-adjustment-consumer-price-inflation
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ijc:ijcjou:y:2026:q:1:a:6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bank for International Settlements (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.ijcb.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.