Seminar invitation: Measuring the Digital Economy

Marshall Reinsdorf (IMF) will visit the Research Department, Statistics Norway on Monday 11 June and Tuesday 12 June 2018. He will give two seminars/lectures: 

Monday, June 11th 2018

09.30 – 11.15: ” Reflections on Measuring the Digital Economy“

Over past two years, the IMF Statistics Department has written, or contributed to, several papers on measuring the digital economy. Implications of digitalization for a broad range of statistics have been considered, including price indexes, growth and productivity statistics, balance of payments, monetary and financial statistics, and employment statistics. This presentation will discuss the main findings and recommendations of the recently issued IMF Policy Paper on Measuring the Digital Economy and provide some perspectives on key issues from the digital economy for

Tuesday, June 12th 2018

09.30 – 11.15: “ Recent Developments in Price Index Theory”

Two recent papers suggest novel or refined solutions to the difficult problems in cost of living index theory of changes in preferences and changes in the products present in the marketplace. A new approach to changing preferences is proposed in Redding and Weinstein (2018) “CES unified price index” (CUPI), which corrects the standard CES price index for effects of changing consumer-valuation. The parallels between the consumer-valuation correction and the downward effect of price dispersion on cost of living indexes discussed in an older literature help to clarify the nature of the correction. Second, Diewert and Feenstra (2017) re-examined past approaches to accounting for new and disappearing goods in cost of living indexes based on reservation prices and Feenstra's (1994) adjustment to the CES index and develop a new, a more conservative alternative. This presentation will review and assess these  

The seminars are open for everyone.

Participants from institutions other than Statistics Norway are kindly asked to give word to Thomas von Brasch (email thomas.vonbrasch@ssb.no) so that he can arrange for easy access to the building.