What Drives the Difference between Online and Official Price Indexes?

Oleksandr Faryna, Oleksandr Talavera () and Tetiana Yukhymenko ()
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Tetiana Yukhymenko: National Bank of Ukraine

Visnyk of the National Bank of Ukraine, 2018, issue 243, 21-32

Abstract: This paper examines the associations between online price indexes and official statistics. First, we generate online CPI component sub-indexes, which are later aggregated to an Online Price CPI. This approach is applied to our unique dataset which contains about 3 million observations of online retail prices for consumer goods in Ukraine’s five largest cities. The data span over the period 2016m1 – 2017m12 and cover about 46% of Ukraine’s Consumer Price Inflation basket. We find that online inflation is generally consistent with official estimates, but the matching capability varies across sub-indexes. Although the differences can partially be explained by poor dataset coverage, we find that online prices may indeed represent new information that is not captured by official statistics.

Keywords: Online prices; web scraping; consumer price index; micro prices; big data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 E31 E37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ukb:journl:y:2018:i:243:p:21-32

DOI: 10.26531/vnbu2018.243.021

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