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There are other income factors, besides the aggregate national income and labour income factors discussed in Ch. 4, that contribute as much uncertainty to the incomes of individuals and organizations as do many risks currently traded in financial markets. If those who retail insurance policies against risks of changes in values of claims on incomes or service flows are to be able to tailor their insurance to the various exposures that their different clients have to these risks, they will want to layoff in hedging markets the risks of changes in these income factors that influence them because they are providing the insurance policies. This chapter considers some of the most salient of these other markets: real estate, unincorporated business, and privately held corporations, consumer and producer price index futures, agriculture, and art and collectibles. It also presents some ideas on systematic approaches to finding other markets, including modelling the tendency for co‐movement of incomes and inferring the underlying factors, i.e. looking for the major risk factors to incomes for which new markets would be most useful.

Presents improved estimates of the cost of living and the real wages of labourers in the western part of the Netherlands. The results show that even in this relatively dynamic economy there was a decline in real wages during the Early Modern Period.

The most widely used total or headline inflation measure is the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Inflation is often said to be “persistent increases in the general level of prices, or a persistent decline in the purchasing power of money, caused by an increase in available currency and credit beyond available quantities of goods and services.” Inflation measures developed based on this approach represent partial measures only, because they pertain to a number of individual transactions in specific markets. The cost of this subset of goods and services is then compared in two distinct periods to yield a measure of inflation.

This chapter examines welfare measures when they are made without cardinal utility functions to understand the properties of the aggregate dollar changes in utility computed in a conventional Harberger (1971) analysis. The Hatta (1977) decomposition is used to show how, for individual consumers, dollars are a reliable proxy for utility, whenever policy changes are incrementally small. This decomposition finds that income effects are a scaling coefficient on the efficiency effects from marginal policy changes that play no role in single consumer economies. A number of different approaches are examined to account for distributional effects when there are heterogenous consumers.

Debt of households has been rising rapidly since 1995. The debt to income ratio of the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution has risen well above 140 percent. The same measure for the top five percent has been stable near 60 percent for 25 years. Low interest rates, easy credit terms, subprime mortgages, and mortgage refinancings have all stimulated consumer borrowing. The housing bubble, nationwide, encouraged consumers to extract cash from their properties. Panel regressions relating per capita household debt to declining income shares by state of the bottom 80 percent show that as income shares decline household debt rises. Economic insecurity objectively measured has been rising. The share of household budgets spent on the necessities of housing, health care and education have risen for all quintiles. Prices of those three have exceeded inflation for 20 years. Stagnant incomes and rising prices for those necessities have lured households to take on more debt to sustain their standard of living.

“Moore’s Law” in the semiconductor manufacturing industry is the predictable evolution of a manufacturing technology platform that has continuously reduced the costs of fabricating electronic circuits since the mid-1960s. This chapter reviews how this progression delivered 20 to 30 percent average annual transistor manufacturing cost declines while it lasted. We review how other characteristics associated with smaller feature sizes created additional economic value, and assess their historical trends. These benefits pose special challenges for price and innovation measurement, and motivate quality adjustment methods when measuring semiconductor product prices. Empirical analysis reveals a slowdown in Moore’s Law as measured by quality-adjusted prices for the highest volume products: memory chips, custom chip designs outsourced to foundries, and Intel microprocessors. We assess whether Intel microprocessor price trends might diverge from those of other semiconductor chips. A model of chip characteristics’ effects on microprocessor performance is specified and tested in a structural econometric model of processor performance. A small set of characteristics explains 99% of variance across processor models’ performance on common benchmarks. The diverse effects of changing characteristics on manufacturing costs create a rationale for their inclusion in hedonic price models separate from their demand-side effects on computer performance.

The accuracy and integrity of BEA’s featured measures, including inflation-adjusted (i.e., “real”) GDP, consumer spending and business investment, rely on the ability to accurately measure quality adjusted price indexes. It is often the case that high-profile, innovative goods and services that reflect rapidly changing technologies and notable improvements present significant measurement challenges using traditional approaches, especially when required to be produced at high frequencies. With an aim toward facilitating and encouraging further price research, this paper first provides a historical perspective and an analysis of BEA’s ICT prices, including an overview of the sources and methods used to construct BEA’s quality-adjusted prices. In the second part of the paper, we discuss current-work and future plans for continuing to ensure the accuracy of BEA’s price indexes and corresponding inflation-adjusted measures. Appendix A provides an update that assesses recent progress in price measurement as reflected in BEA’s 15th comprehensive update of the NIPAs, released July 27, 2018.

This chapter provides a detailed history of the evolution of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and a comprehensive review of the various commissions formed to study it. It reveals the long-standing nature of many CPI issues that are still controversial today. Apart from providing various CPI reviews, the authors present their views on the alternative methodological foundations for a consumer price index and, in particular, debate the merits of the economic or Cost-of-Living Index (COLI) approach versus the Cost-of-Goods Index (COGI). It is found that the COLI approach to CPI index construction is superior to either the COGI or test approaches, but it is also noted that the test approach can be useful on occasion as a supplement to the economic approach to index construction.

The measurement of the output of the medical care system is necessary to assess the productivity levels and growth of a country's economy and medical care system. Medical price indexes have uses other than those involving output and productivity measurement. In the United States, both within the health sector and more generally, contracts occasionally contain provisions that depend on growth of the medical Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI and the Producer Price Index (PPI) are also employed in updating fee schedules for certain administered pricing schemes and payments to some health plans. This chapter reviews the measurement issues underlying the construction of medical care price indexes. It describes procedures employed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the construction of its medical CPIs and PPIs (including recent revisions and changes). It also discusses alternative notions of medical care output that involve the price of a treatment episode rather than the prices of fixed bundles of inputs. Finally, the chapter outlines salient features of a new price index for health expenditures.

This chapter provides a description of basic price index techniques, the intuition underlying their construction, and how one interprets the results. In particular, the chapter provides instructions on how to construct fixed-based and chained indexes and discusses some of the common problems, like substitution bias, the new goods problem and chain drift. It also discusses the intuition behind two popular interpretations of price indexes: the cost of living index interpretation and the constant-quality price index interpretation. The formulas considered are: Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher Ideal, Tornquist, Jevons.