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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (46155)	4/14/2000 9:11:00 AM
From: Les H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

CPI comes in at 0.8%, 0.4% for core bls.gov As previously announced, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is extending the use in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) of quality adjustments derived from hedonic models. A hedonic model decomposes the price of a consumer product into implicit prices for each of its important features and components, thereby providing an estimate of the value of each feature and component. We plan to extend this method to additional items in the CPI. As we do so, we will give CPI users notice at least three months before the first use of hedonic quality adjustment for each additional item and will have detailed background papers on the models to be employed available by the time of first use. As first announced at the time of the October 1999 CPI release, hedonic quality adjustments for 12 audio products and for video cameras were incorporated into the index effective with the January 2000 CPI. Audio products are in the Audio equipment item stratum and video cameras are in Other video equipment, which contains video equipment other than televisions. Papers describing these adjustments are on the CPI web site. (http://stats.bls.gov/cpihome.htm). Effective with the CPI for April 2000, BLS will extend hedonic quality adjustment to Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) and Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) players, two other items in the Other video equipment item stratum. The relative importance (share of weight), as of December 1999, of this stratum was 0.062 percent in the CPI for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U) and 0.071 percent in the CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI- W). Within Other video equipment, VCRs are estimated to represent 46 percent of the weight and DVD players about 6 percent. Camcorders represent about 30 percent. The remaining items in this stratum--those that will not be subject to hedonic quality adjustment at this ti