Understanding Price Variation Across Stores and Supermarket Chains: Some Implications for CPI Aggregation Methods

Lorraine Ivancic () and Kevin Fox
Additional contact information
Lorraine Ivancic: Centre for Applied Economic Research, The University of New South Wales

No 2010-17, Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales

Abstract: The empirical literature on price indices consistently finds that aggregation methods have a considerable impact, particularly when scanner data are used. This paper outlines a novel approach to test for the homogeneity of goods and hence for the appropriateness of aggregation. A hedonic regression framework is used to test for item homogeneity across four supermarket chains and across stores within each of these supermarket chains. We find empirical support for the aggregation of prices across stores which belong to the same supermarket chain. Support was also found for the aggregation of prices across three of the four supermarket chains.

Keywords: Price indexes; aggregation; scanner data; unit values; item homogeneity; hedonics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 E31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://research.economics.unsw.edu.au/RePEc/papers/2010-17.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity

Related works:
Journal Article: Understanding Price Variation Across Stores and Supermarket Chains: Some Implications for CPI Aggregation Methods (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:swe:wpaper:2010-17

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hongyi Li ().