Nov 19, 2010

Measuring inflation more accurately

From the Wall Street Journal:

Roberto Rigobon and Alberto Cavallo at MIT have come up with a method to scour the Internet for online prices on millions of items and then use them to calculate inflation statistics for a dozen countries on a daily basis. The two have been collecting data for the project for more than three years, but only made their results public this week... Currently, Labor Department workers visit or call thousands of stores and other establishments to collect prices. That is "the way they were doing it 70 years ago," Mr. Rigobon said. "We can do better."

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