IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bls/wpaper/515.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Revisiting taste change in cost-of-living measurement

Author

Listed:
  • Robert S. Martin

Abstract

This paper derives conditional cost-of-living indexes (COLI) for the Constant Elasticity of Substitution model in the presence of taste change. Recent proposals to incorporate changing tastes reflect a different conceptual target (an unconditional COLI) from a consumer price index (a conditional COLI), and a strong implicit assumption (cardinal utility). Using Nielsen retail scanner data for food and beverage products, I find that tastes can dominate prices in unconditional COLI estimates, while they have smaller impacts on conditional COLI. Using CPI data, I find that category-level tastes have a relatively minor average effect on an all-items price index.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert S. Martin, 2019. "Revisiting taste change in cost-of-living measurement," Economic Working Papers 515, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    • Handle: RePEc:bls:wpaper:515
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2019/pdf/ec190050.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. David R Baqaee & Ariel Burstein, 2023. "Welfare and Output With Income Effects and Taste Shocks," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 138(2), pages 769-834.

    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:bls:wpaper:515. 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: Jennifer Cassidy-Gilbert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/blsgvus.html .

    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.