Time：4:00pm - 5:30pm, Sep. 20, 2019

Venue：Room 359S, Overseas 

Exchange Center, Peking University

Speaker：Alexis Antoniades

(Georgetown University in Qatar)

Online price data provide a new and rich source of information. But in the absence of information on quantities or expenditure, researchers will treat equally the prices and price behavior across all products within a product group. In doing so, they introduce significant measurement error and potential bias. In this paper, we address this limitation by presenting a simple methodological innovation that allows researchers to impute expenditure when expenditure is not known. With a retail model based on standard assumptions, we show that measures of the retail distribution — which can be computed solely from price observations — provide a good and theoretically consistent proxy for expenditure. Through a series of simulations that use scanner-level price and quantity information on about 85% of the Fast Moving Consumer Goods sold in six Gulf countries, we show that treating all products equally introduces substantial measurement error and bias in the calculation of price stickiness, inflation, and international price differences. But we also show that adding information on the retail distribution reduces measurement error substantially in each of these exercises. Our findings also have important implications for the work of the International Comparison Program.

Dr. Alexis Antoniades is an Associate Professor and Director of International Economics at Georgetown University in Qatar. A Fulbright scholar with a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, he is an expert on global markets and and a leading authority on the economies of the Gulf countries, Qatar in particular. He was awarded a $1,050,000 research grant (2009-2012) by the Qatar National Research Fund to undertake the first micro-study on the economies of the Gulf countries, and a $867,000 research grant to use social media and analyze sentiment in the Arab World (2014 2017) in collaboration with colleagues from Qatar University. His research exploits micro/big data to answer macro questions. Antoniades previously worked as an assistant economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and at Princeton University as the recipient of the prestigious Niehaus Fellowship. In his ten years in Qatar, Dr. Antoniades frequently advises the leadership of both public and private sector organizations. His previous work has been published in The Economic Journal, Journal of International Economics, and International Economic Review.