Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina’s Inflation

By Alberto Cavallo. 2013

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prices collected from online retailers can be used to construct daily price indexes that complement official statistics. This paper studies their ability to match official inflation estimates in five Latin American countries, with a focus on Argentina, where official statistics have been heavily criticized in recent years. The data were collected between October 2007 and March 2011 from the largest supermarket in each country. In Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela, online price indexes approximate both the level and main dynamics of official inflation. By contrast, Argentina's online inflation rate is nearly three times higher than the official estimate.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aab5f15a2a9a2351da30ce1d83a587a0bf513596

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Citations in the corpus

Rebasing 'Maddison' : new income comparisons and the shape of long-run economic development (2018, background): “We take these at face value, even in cases where there may doubts about the quality or veracity of the statistics (for example, Argentina, see Cavallo, 2013).”
Critical Data Studies: A dialog on data and space (2016, background): “The Billion Prices Project (Cavallo, 2013), an Argentine inﬂation index, was created at MIT when Argentine economists were threatened for challenging national inﬂation statistics (Wall Street Journal, 2011).”
Data ex Machina: Introduction to Big Data (2017, background): “Finally, Cavallo (2013) demonstrates the social impact of nowcasting.”
Scraped Data and Sticky Prices (2016, unknown): “PriceStats LLC was co-founded by Alberto Cavallo. More details on the data collection methods and applications for these datasets can be found in Cavallo and Rigobon (2016).”
Inflation Expectations, Learning and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments (2017, background): “See Cavallo (2013) and Cavallo, Cruces and Pérez-Truglia (2014) for more details. xi age and gender composition, our sample is substantially more educated (and therefore richer) than average.”
The Billion Prices Project: Using Online Prices for Measurement and Research (2016, methodology): “More details on the manipulation of inflation statistics in Argentina and its impact on inflation expectations can be found in Cavallo, Cruces, and Perez-Truglia (2014, 2016). (4)It also implied that the government was not using a particularly sophisticated algorithm to change the inflation rate. In”