Inflation at the Household Level

By Greg Kaplan, Sam Schulhofer-Wohl. 2017

204 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use scanner data to estimate inflation rates at the household level. Households' inflation rates have an annual interquartile range of 6.2 to 9.0 percentage points. Most of the heterogeneity comes not from variation in broadly defined consumption bundles but from variation in prices paid for the same types of goods. Lower-income households experience higher inflation, but most cross-sectional variation is uncorrelated with observables. Households' deviations from aggregate inflation exhibit only slightly negative serial correlation. Almost all variability in a household's inflation rate comes from variability in household-level prices relative to average prices, not from variability in aggregate inflation.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7140784c2b33ef5d076bab1d49aa7d12c8916136

Citations in the corpus

• Exposure to Daily Price Changes and Inflation Expectations (2019, unknown): “Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl (2017) document that households differ significantly in the grocery prices they pay despite similar consumption bundles, generating an interquartile range of realized inflation between 6.”