The spread of COVID‐19 has led to sweeping changes in the way households work, spend their time and shop, resulting in different shopping patterns and rapid price changes in some goods. How will changes such as these be reflected in headline inflation measures such as the Consumer Prices Index (CPI)? This paper discusses problems in interpreting the CPI as a measure of how the cost of living is changing during the lockdown.
Authors
Richard Blundell
Richard is Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) and Senior Research Fellow at IFS.
Rachel Griffith
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.
Martin O'Connell
Martin, previously Deputy Research Director, is a Research Fellow at IFS and Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin.
Peter Levell
Peter joined in 2009. He has published several papers on the microeconomics of household spending and labour supply decisions over the life-cycle.
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