Abstract

Lawrence Ernst, William H. Johnson and William E. Larson (2007) "Reduction of Sample Areas in the Consumer Price Index and Consumer Expenditure Survey Designs "

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) are surveys with multistage designs, revised every 10 years. The first stage CPI and CE samples include a set of areas (PSUs) selected from the set of U.S Core Based Statistical Areas. CE additionally selects a set of PSUs to represent the rest of the nation. After selecting the original sample of PSUs, a reduction was considered for budgetary reasons, a reduction implemented in CE only. In this paper we describe: the details of the reduction process used and alternative approaches; the adjustment of the PSU weights resulting from the reduction, which was complicated by the use of a maximization of overlap procedure in the original selection of the new sample PSUs; possible improvements to the overlap procedure in the next redesign; and the impact of having different sets of CPI and CE sample PSUs.

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Last Modified Date: November 17, 2008