Using the Retail Distribution of Sellers to Impute Expenditure Shares

We provide the code needed to generate the results in "Using the Retail Distribution of Sellers to Impute Expenditure Shares".<br><br>Abstract:<br>Many price indices must be constructed without item-specific quantity data for the elementary expenditure aggregates. The paper shows that for some consumer goods in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and in the United States from 2006 to 2011, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers.These weights are the share of stores selling an item, or the share of stores adjusted by the total number of items sold in those stores. Relative to using no weights, the paper finds that using retail-distribution-imputed weights substantially reduce bias in the frequency of price changes, in annual inflation, and in price comparisons across countries.