Variation Across Household in the Rate of Inflation

This paper reports on an empirical investigation of the distribution of inflation rates across households. The study uses a large cross-sectional survey of households to obtain information on the composition of the market bundles of goods and services purchased by each of several thousand households in the U.S. It also uses published data for the U.S. on monthly changes in the separate indices of prices of some fifty expenditure items which comprise consumers' market bundles. With information on price changes for these fifty items and the composition of households' consumption bundles, a price index is computed for each of some 11,000 households separately for several recent periods of time. The distributions of these price indices are studied and the relationships between household characteristics and these price indices are investigated.