IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2000-167.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Plutocratic Bias in the CPI: Evidence from Spain

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. Javier Ruiz Castillo
  • Mr. Eduardo Ley
  • Mr. Mario Izquierdo

Abstract

We define the plutocratic bias as the difference between inflation measured according to the current official CPI and a democratic index in which all households receive the same weight. We estimate that during the 1990s the plutocratic bias in Spain amounts to 0.055 percent per year. However, positive and negative biases cancel off when averaging over the whole period. The mean absolute bias is significantly larger, 0.090. We can explain most of the oscillations experimented by the plutocratic bias by the price behavior of three goods: a luxury good and two necessities.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. Javier Ruiz Castillo & Mr. Eduardo Ley & Mr. Mario Izquierdo, 2000. "The Plutocratic Bias in the CPI: Evidence from Spain," IMF Working Papers 2000/167, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2000/167
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=3823
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Petr Janský & Pavel Hait, 2016. "Inflation Differentials among Czech Households," Prague Economic Papers, Prague University of Economics and Business, vol. 2016(1), pages 71-84.
    2. Carlos Guerrero de Lizardi, 2010. "Alternative Consumer Price Indexes for Mexico," CID Working Papers 42, Center for International Development at Harvard University.
    3. Blow, Laura & Crawford, Ian, 2002. "A nonparametric method for valuing new goods," Working Paper Series 0143, European Central Bank.
    4. Alvaro Montenegro, 2004. "50 anos del índice de precios en Colombia," Documentos de Economía 1904, Universidad Javeriana - Bogotá.
    5. repec:aru:wpaper:201301 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Alessandra Cepparulo & Francesca Gastaldi & Paolo Liberati, 2010. "The distributional and welfare impact of inflation in Italy," Working Papers in Public Economics 134, Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Roma.
    7. Eduardo Ley, 2002. "On Plutocratic and Democratic CPIs," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 4(3), pages 1-5.
    8. Ruiz-Castillo, Javier & Ley, Eduardo & Izquierdo, Mario, 2002. "Distributional aspects of the quality change bias in the CPI: evidence from Spain," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 137-144, June.
    9. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:4:y:2002:i:3:p:1-5 is not listed on IDEAS

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2000/167. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.