Estimating the Impact of Quality Adjustment on Consumer Price Inflation

Jan-Oliver Menz, Elisabeth Wieland and Günter W. Beck
Additional contact information
Günter W. Beck: University of Siegen and Miggroprices

International Journal of Central Banking, 2026, vol. 22, issue 1, 253-311

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.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ijcb.org/journal/v22n1/estimating-impa ... umer-price-inflation (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating the impact of quality adjustment on consumer price inflation (2023)
Working Paper: Estimating the impact of quality adjustment on consumer price inflation (2022)
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:ijc:ijcjou:y:2026:q:1:a:6

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Central Banking is currently edited by Loretta J. Mester

More articles in International Journal of Central Banking from International Journal of Central Banking
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bank for International Settlements ().