Centre for Price and Inflation at Cardiff

The Centre for Price and Inflation (CPI) explores a variety of data on prices in order to develop the understanding and modelling of inflation, in addition to the behaviour of prices in relation to both firms and consumers.

The group has close links with the ONS and other institutions such as the Bank of England and Bank of France. Since 2014, The Centre has hosted an annual workshop organised jointly with the ONS held at Cardiff. Keynote speakers have included Yoel Finkel, Associate National Statistician from the Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), Fabio Bacchini, Head of Division for data analysis and economic research ISTAT (Italy).

The group seeks to develop the design and implementation of price-indices, right through from their theoretical underpinnings to their practical application. It has also developed the statistical tools for applying survival analysis to price data to better measure nominal rigidity and the design of monetary policy. Wider issues, ranging from surveys of expectations and big data are also studied.

The CPI research group adopts an interdisciplinary approach, which draws on economics, marketing and accounting. Our aim is to influence the academic community and to inform policy through the creation of a network of researchers and policymakers from across the UK, Europe and the world.

Research

Current research themes

Understanding and modelling inflation as a macroeconomic phenomenon which arises from microeconomic behaviour.
Understanding and modelling the way prices and wages are determined in a way that is consistent with the microeconomic data on prices and wages.
Developing better the design of price indices both in theory and in terms of better implementation from both an economic and statistical perspective.
Integrating the behavioural approach to understand the consumer choice and the pricing behaviour of firms.
Relating the micro data on inflationary expectations to the behaviour of consumers and inflation.
Behavioural analysis of cognitive styles and consumer innovativeness in a range of areas such as brand choice, technology consumer behaviour, technology acceptance and electronic marketing services.

Collaborative research

Members of the CPI group collaborate with a range of academic and non-academic partners. Examples include:

Office for National Statistics (ONS): Projects include ‘Testing Item Selection Procedures on TNS Data’ (2011-2012), Stock-weighted House Price Index, England and Wales: 1995 to 2015 preliminary estimates (2016-18), The use of Scanner data in the Living cost and food survey (2017-2018).
The National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR). As a response the pandemic, we collaborated in developing the Lockdown weighted CPI inflation measure from April 2020 – April 2021.
Bank of England: Professor Huw Dixon was an external consultant on a project with Stephen Millard, entitled ‘How should we respond to sector-specific shocks?’ (2021).
Bank of Greece. Huw Dixon is consultant on the Price-setting Microdata Analysis Network (PRISMA) (2021 onwards).
European Stability Mechanism (Luxembourg). Konstantinos Theodoridis is currently Principal Economist working on a range of projects.
Banque de France: Professor Huw Dixon was a Visiting Scholar to work on the project ‘Nominal rigidities in France. Testing different pricing behaviour’ (2008-2010).

Publications

CPI staff have been working on the core research themes since 2009 and have published many influential papers on a range of topics. These include the following publications.