Article
Journal of Monetary Economics

Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina's Inflation

Format:Print

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Inflation; Online Price Index; Economics; Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; Price; Latin America; Argentina

Citation

Cavallo, Alberto. "Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina's Inflation." Journal of Monetary Economics 60, no. 2 (March 2013): 152–165.

Supplemental Information

Micro Data

This dataset contains the raw data files for each country. These are daily posted prices for all goods sold by each of the largest supermarkets in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela; collected from October 2007 to March 2011.

Data and Replication Files

This zip file has the main data file with all the online and official price indexes shown in the paper. The zip also contains separate files for cpi data and indexes from inflacionverdadera.com used by the replication scripts. Download this file if you want to replicate or use the data in the graphs showns in the paper.

Appendix