New Insights on Inflation from a Billion Prices

EconoFact Chats

The Bureau of Labor Statistics samples about 80,000 products and services each month to estimate headline inflation. But the published inflation rate, like many other aggregate statistics, masks very different price changes across categories of goods. What information can we glean from a more fine-grained look at price changes across more disaggregated categories of goods and services, or even particular products? EconoFact Chats welcomes back Alberto Cavallo to discuss insights from his analysis of over a billion prices, focusing on whether recent inflation dynamics across countries have followed similar patterns, how disaggregated numbers can help us understand when inflation turns higher or lower, and what's been happening with U.S. inflation most recently. Alberto is the Thomas S. Murphy Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He co-founded The Billion Prices Project, and Price Stats — the leading private source of inflation statistics in over 20 countries.