Abstract
Mary Lee Fuxa (1998) "Estimating Price Relatives for the U.S.
Consumer Price Index When Priced Items are Restratified," Proceedings of the Section
on Business and Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association.
For the 1998 revision of the Consumer Price Index, the stratification of priced items
was extensively redefined. Of the 183 item strata: 33 percent did not change; 24 percent
were designated for new sampling; 43 percent changed but were not designated for new
sampling due to budgetary constraints. Until new samples are rotated in for the 43
percent, an adjusted method of estimation is needed for the monthly price relatives used
to compute the index. The price relative for an item stratum and geographic area is a
ratio of the sum of weighted price quotes for the current month to the sum for the
previous month. This paper presents a method for adjusting the quote-level weights.
Estimates with adjusted weights are computed for a test geographic area using the retained
sample. They are compared to estimates with nonadjusted weights that are computed using a
newly selected sample.
Last Modified Date: July 19, 2008
|