The measurement of retail output and the retail revolution

Leonard Nakamura

No 97-4, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: The computerization of retailing has made price dispersion a norm in the United States, so that any given list price or transactions price is an increasingly imperfect measure of a product's resource cost. As a consequence, measuring the real output of retailers has become increasingly difficult. Food retailing is used as a case study to examine data problems in retail productivity measurement. Crude direct measures of grocery store output suggest that the CPI for food-at-home may have been overstated by 1.4 percentage points annually from 1978 to 1996.

Keywords: Consumer price indexes; Prices; Retail trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1997
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The measurement of retail output and the retail revolution (1999)
Working Paper: Measurement of retail output and the retail revolution (1998)
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