Online and official price indexes: Measuring Argentina's inflation
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Paper-Arg - Final.pdf
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734.16 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Cavallo, Alberto F.
Date Issued
March 2013
Journal
Journal of Monetary Economics
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Cavallo, Alberto. “Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina’s Inflation.” Journal of Monetary Economics 60, no. 2 (March 2013): 152–165.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Prices collected from online retailers can be used to construct daily price indexes that complement official statistics. This paper studies their ability to match official inflation estimates in five Latin American countries, with a focus on Argentina, where official statistics have been heavily criticized in recent years. The data were collected between October 2007 and March 2011 from the largest supermarket in each country. In Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela, online price indexes approximate both the level and main dynamics of official inflation. By contrast, Argentina's online inflation rate is nearly three times higher than the official estimate.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2012.10.002
