TY  - JOUR
AU  - Blair, Caitlin
TI  - Constructing a PCE-Weighted Consumer Price Index
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19582
PY  - 2013
Y2  - October 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19582
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19582
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19582.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Caitlin Blair
(Formerly of the Bureau of Labor Statistics)
U.S. Department of Commerce
1401 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20230
E-Mail: Caitlin.Blair@Trade.gov
M1  - published as Caitlin Blair. "Constructing a PCE-Weighted Consumer Price Index," in Christopher D. Carroll, Thomas F. Crossley, and John Sabelhaus, editors, "Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures" University of Chicago Press (2015)

M3  - presented at "Conference on Research in Income and Wealth", December 2-3, 2011
AB  - This study investigates the effects of simulating the Consumer Price Index (CPI) with alternately sourced weights on the inflation experience for an average US consumer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics currently uses household spending data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) to construct expenditure category weights, or "item" weights, in the CPI. The Bureau of Economic Analysis also estimates consumer expenditures, but does so at a national level for publication of Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) in the National Income and Product Accounts. In this paper, 2005-2010 price indexes that utilize PCE weights instead of CE expenditure weights are compared with the CPI-Urban in order to evaluate current CPI weighting methods. These comparisons show that the annualized growth rate over five years of an adjusted PCE-weighted CPI is slightly lower than that of the CPI-U, while a reweighted index that uses PCE expenditure definitions grows much more quickly than the CPI.
ER  -