MA Economics Oral Defense-FR

Event Details:

Title: A study on the influencing factors of CPI bias in different groups in Canada

Student: Haoyu Wang

ABSTRACT

The official CPI may misestimate the cost of living for different groups of people, and this bias is related to differences in consumption preferences among different groups. This paper investigates the factors that might explain the size of the CPI bias measured by Emery and Guo (2019) for the years 1999 to 2015. We apply the partial least squares method (PLS) estimates of CPI bias for 10 provinces and 14 sub-groups to determine which subcomponents of the CPI are influential on the CPI bias and give the influence coefficient of each component and their ranking of variable importance in projection (VIP). According to the time characteristics of bias, we also group the samples by time periods for regression. The result shows that gasoline, fuel and clothing are important factors affecting CPI bias of each group. However, when we group the samples in 2010 as the cutoff point, we find that this effect is more significant in the later stage, while the influence factors of each gr oup in the early stage have a large inter-group difference. The differences in time and subgroups reflect the characteristics in consumption structure of different subgroups and the impact of economic situation on them.

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Building: Singer Hall

Room Number: 449