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Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century (2022)

Chapter: Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
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Appendix

Biographical Sketches of Panel Members

Daniel E. Sichel (Chair) is professor of economics at Wellesley College. He also serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, advisory committee member at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and executive committee member for the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. Sichel is a member of the American Economic Association and an international advisory board member for the International Productivity Monitor. He has been awarded several honors including the Indigo Prize in 2017 and the Kendrick Prize in 2010. His research interests and publications are in macroeconomics, economic growth, technology, and economic measurement. Sichel has a B.A. in economics and an M.P.P., both from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.

Ana M. Aizcorbe is a research economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), where she conducts research into price index and other measurement issues. Prior to this position, she served as BEA’s chief economist, where she initiated a Health Satellite Account that allows for the identification of drivers underlying the cost of treating diseases. Aizcorbe also held positions as an American Statistical Association/National Science Foundation/Bureau of Labor Statistics research fellow, staff economist at the Federal Reserve Board, visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution, and research economist in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She has published the book A Practical Guide to Price Index and Hedonic Techniques and numerous articles on the theoretical issues underlying price measurement, with empirical applications to the high-technology and service sectors. Aizcorbe

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×

has a B.A. in economics from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in economics from Boston College.

Jan De Haan is a senior researcher at Statistics Netherlands, the Dutch national statistical institute. Until January 2019, he was also a professor at the Delft University of Technology. He is a member of the steering committee of the International Working Group on Price Indices (Ottawa Group) and an elected member of the U.S. Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. In the past, he has served as an advisor to many statistical institutes, including Statistics Canada, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and Statistics New Zealand, and is an affiliate of the University of New South Wales’ Real Estate Initiative. His main research interest is economic measurement, with a focus on index numbers and applications to scanner data and web-scraped data, real estate, hedonic regression methods, and price and volume measurement of public services. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. He has an M.A. in economics from the University of Amsterdam and a Ph.D. in economic measurement from Erasmus University Rotterdam.

W. Erwin Diewert is professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and the University of New South Wales. He has published more than 120 papers in journals and 140 chapters in books. His main areas of research include duality theory, flexible functional forms, index number theory (including the concept of a superlative index number formula), the measurement of productivity, the measurement of property prices, the pure theory of international trade, and the calculation of excess burdens of taxation. He was awarded the Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics in 2005. He is a founding member of two international groups that study measurement issues: the Ottawa Group on Prices and the Canberra Group on Capital Measurement. He currently serves as chair of the Statistics Canada advisory committee on prices. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Lisa M. Lynch is provost and Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at Brandeis University. She is also a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Economic Advisory Panel and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at IZA Germany. She has researched and published extensively on the impact of technological change and organizational innovation on productivity and wages, the determinants of youth unemployment, and the school-to-work transition. Lynch has an A.B. from Wellesley College and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×

Raven S. Molloy is assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where she oversees work related to residential and commercial mortgage credit conditions, real estate prices, and housing markets. Her primary fields of research are housing, and urban and labor economics, and she has written on topics including housing supply regulation, housing affordability and valuation, mortgage credit availability, migration, foreclosure, vacancy, and executive compensation. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Housing Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, and Regional Science and Urban Economics. She is a committee member of the Women in Real Estate Network of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and a fellow of the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics of the Homer Hoyt Institute. She has a B.A. in economics and Asian studies from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Brent R. Moulton is senior economist in the Statistics Department of the International Monetary Fund. He has spent 32 years working in federal economic statistics, serving as associate director for national economic accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis and as chief of price and index number research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He received the Julius Shiskin Award for leadership in implementing major innovations into the U.S. national accounts. Previously, he served as a member of the international advisory expert group on national accounts, which worked on the development of the updated international standards in the System of National Accounts 2008. He is the author of numerous articles on economic measurement including essential research on lower-level substitution bias in the Consumer Price Index that led to the adoption by BLS of the geometric mean formula. He has a B.A. in economics from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Marshall B. Reinsdorf is senior economist at the International Monetary Fund, working in areas of statistical methodology, and is president of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. He was previously chief of the national accounts research group at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a financial economist at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and a research economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He is an expert in macroeconomic statistics, including national accounts, prices, and productivity. He is an author of more than 40 articles on economics and statistics and an editor of two books on economic measurement. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×

Laura Rosner-Warburton is senior economist and founding partner at MacroPolicy Perspectives, LLC, specializing in the areas of monetary policy and inflation. She began her career in the financial services industry, working as an economist for Barclays Capital, and in a policy analysis group in the Markets Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her work on inflation spans a range of economic and market environments and benefits from a blend of macro and micro perspectives. In the past, she has contributed to the development and design of the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Survey of Primary Dealers. She has a B.A. in economics from Columbia University.

Louise M. Sheiner is Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow and policy director at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Prior to this position, she was senior economist at the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System. Her expertise covers a range of disciplines, including public finance, health economics, fiscal policy, public economics, and welfare. She has written widely on subjects such as health care spending, macroeconomic implications of aging, household spending, and Medicare. Her recent publications include Should America Save for Its Old Age? Fiscal Policy, Population Aging, and National Saving; Generational Aspects of Medicare; and Demographics and Medical Care Spending. She has an A.B. in biology, an M.A. in economics, and a Ph.D. in economics, all from Harvard University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×
Page 175
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×
Page 176
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×
Page 177
Suggested Citation:"Appendix: Biographical Sketches of Panel Members." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26485.
×
Page 178
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The Consumer Price Index (CPI), produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is the most widely used measure of inflation in the U.S. It is used to determine cost-of-living allowances and, among many other important private- and public-sector applications, influences monetary policy. The CPI has traditionally relied on field-generated data, such as prices observed in person at grocery stores or retailers. However, as these data have become more challenging and expensive to collect in a way that reflects an increasingly dynamic marketplace, statistical agencies and researchers have begun turning to opportunities created by the vast digital sources of consumer price data that have emerged. The enormous economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, including major shifts in consumers' shopping patterns, presents a perfect case study for the need to rapidly employ new data sources for the CPI.

Modernizing the Consumer Price Index presents guidance to BLS as the agency embarks on a strategy of accelerating and enhancing the use of scanner, web-scraped, and digital data directly from retailers in compiling the CPI. The report also recommends strategies for BLS to more accurately estimate the composition of households' expenditures - or market basket shares - by updating this information more frequently and using innovative survey techniques and alternative data sources where possible. The report provides targeted guidance for integrating new data sources to improve the CPI's estimation of changes in the prices of housing and medical care, two consumer expenditure categories that are traditionally difficult to measure. Because of the urgency of issues related to income and wealth inequality, the report also recommends that BLS identify data sources that would allow it to estimate price indexes defined by income quintile or decile.

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