The Distribution Analysis of the Inflation Components of Turkey

Nazif Catik () and A. Özlem Önder

No 902, Working Papers from Ege University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates distribution of inflation items using various measures of skewness and kurtosis for Turkey covering the period 1996-2007. Considering sensitivity of traditional distribution measures to outlying observations robust skewness and kurtosis are also computed as a novelty. Analysis results mainly reveal that inflation components are right skewed and fat tailed as documented by the previous studies. However due to possible effects of the outliers traditional measures, in particular skewness, are lagging behind the robust measures in identifying underlying dispersion. Therefore one can say that weighted mean inflation used to measure general price changes is not trustworthy and a biased estimator of central location. Our results further suggest that core measures based on constant and symmetric trimming applied by the previous studies for Turkey is somewhat deficient since skewness of the data is ignored in the estimation process. Therefore, to obtain more reliable information in monitoring general price movements we suggest use of asymmetric trimmed means estimators which allows trimming different percentages from each tail of the distribution.

Keywords: Infation; Prices; Distribution; Robust Skewness; Robust; Kurtosis. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 E31 E52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 11 pages
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cba, nep-cwa and nep-mon
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http://iibf.ege.edu.tr/economics/papers/wp09-02.pdf First version, 2009 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ege:wpaper:0902

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