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How can big data enhance the timeliness of official statistics?

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  • Harchaoui, Tarek M.
  • Janssen, Robert V.

Abstract

The daily consumer price index (CPI) produced by the Billion Prices Project (BPP CPI) offers a glimpse of the direction taken by consumer price inflation in real time. This is in contrast to the official U.S. CPI, which is compiled monthly and released with an average of a three-week delay following the end of the reference month. A recent body of research contended that the movements of online prices are representative of those of offline retail prices, making the BPP CPI a natural candidate for accurately improving the timeliness of the official CPI. We assess the predictive content of the BPP CPI using a variety of MIDAS models that accommodate data sampled at different frequencies. These models generate estimates that remain robust to the variety of time periods considered and, by the standard of the existing literature, contribute to a significant upgrade in the forecast accuracy of official consumer price inflation figures. The paper then sketches the broad implications of BPP CPI for the consumer price statistics maintained by national statistics offices and discusses how the proposed improvement in the timeliness of the official CPI fits in this perspective.

Suggested Citation

  • Harchaoui, Tarek M. & Janssen, Robert V., 2018. "How can big data enhance the timeliness of official statistics?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 225-234.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:34:y:2018:i:2:p:225-234
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2017.12.002
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    1. Szafranek, Karol, 2019. "Bagged neural networks for forecasting Polish (low) inflation," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1042-1059.
    2. Beck, Günter W. & Carstensen, Kai & Menz, Jan-Oliver & Schnorrenberger, Richard & Wieland, Elisabeth, 2023. "Nowcasting consumer price inflation using high-frequency scanner data: Evidence from Germany," Discussion Papers 34/2023, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    3. Margaret M. Jacobson & Christian Matthes & Todd B. Walker, 2022. "Inflation Measured Every Day Keeps Adverse Responses Away: Temporal Aggregation and Monetary Policy Transmission," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2022-054, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    4. Bogdan Oancea, 2023. "Automatic Product Classification Using Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms in Price Statistics," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-32, March.
    5. Ilaria Benedetti & Tiziana Laureti & Luigi Palumbo & Brandon M. Rose, 2022. "Computation of High-Frequency Sub-National Spatial Consumer Price Indexes Using Web Scraping Techniques," Economies, MDPI, vol. 10(4), pages 1-20, April.
    6. Zhenkun Zhou & Zikun Song & Tao Ren, 2022. "Predicting China's CPI by Scanner Big Data," Papers 2211.16641, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.

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