Getting More Personal With Inflation

from the Atlanta Fed

Last week’s inflation report was interesting. The consumer price index (CPI) rose only 1.2 percent in April, as falling energy and flat food prices helped to keep the overall index in check.

Does a 1.2 percent (annualized) rise in the cost of living sound about right to you? No? Well, the performance of the CPI reflects the buying habits of the average urban consumer, which is a way to say it sort of reflects the buying habits of everyone, but isn’t likely to reflect the buying habits of anyone in particular.

Are you a dapper guy? Good news for you – the cost of men’s suits, sport coats, and outerwear fell 4.5 percent (monthly) in April. Fitness buff? Not such good news for you – sporting goods prices jumped 0.9 percent last month. Did you spent a lot of time in the emergency room in April? Even worse news for you: the cost of hospital services rose 1.9 percent last month, their biggest jump in about 25 years! Are you a big blue monster that lives on Sesame Street? Then you had a really good month in April – cookie prices fell 2.4 percent.

OK, you get the idea: different people, different experiences with costs. And of course the folks over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recognize that “it is unlikely that your experience will correspond precisely with either the national indexes or the indexes for specific cities or regions.” (Here are some helpful facts about the CPI.)

But that got us wondering if we could take some of the same building blocks that the BLS uses to construct the CPI and create somewhat more individualized price indexes that reflect a wider variety of price change experiences.

So we created 144 individualized market baskets that attempt to capture some of the variation that occurs across different demographic characteristics including age, income, gender, size of household, education, and whether or not you are a homeowner. (You can find greater detail on the construction of these indexes here.) The resulting indexes – we’re calling this myCPI – may yield a closer approximation to your cost of living experience than one based on the apocryphal average consumer.

For example, suppose you are a single female who is over 55 years old, rents her place, has an income of more than $70,000, and didn’t attend college. In April, your myCPI rose at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, pretty close to the official CPI growth rate of 1.2 percent for the month. However, your myCPI has risen 1.1 percent over the past year, whereas the official CPI has fallen 0.2 percent.

Are you a male, under 35 years old, married, and without a college degree, but you own your home and make more than $70,000 annually? Your myCPI was virtually flat in April, and people matching your description have seen their cost of living decline by 1.0 percent over the past year.

We don’t know exactly what you are buying, where you shop, and what prices you are paying, so we can’t know how closely your particular circumstance matches any of the 144 indexes we came up with. But within some (perhaps large) margin of error, we can construct a market basket based on the spending habits of people who fit your description in rather broadly defined terms, and we can apply the major price components of the CPI to that particular basket of things. So if you want an idea of the rise (or fall) in the cost of living for someone like yourself (and you know you do), head on over to our website, answer a few questions, and sign up. Every month we’ll send you an e-mail update on your myCPI shortly after every CPI release.

Source

http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2015/05/mycpi-getting-personal-with-inflation.html

About the Authors

By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist

Brent Meyer, an economist in the Atlanta Fed’s research department