The Billion Prices Project

(From The Email List That Must Remain Nameless)

The Billion Prices Project is an academic initiative that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research.

This page shows our most recent research leveraging high-frequency price data, including a series of experimental inflation indexes designed to enhance policy decisions. Currently, we are publishing the US online index, a price and product availability index in Japan, as well as a World Inflation Index that provides daily information on global inflation trends.

As you’ll see if you follow the link, the “academic” in this is MIT. We can all lament the liberalization of academia, but there is still top shelf work being done there on a lot of fronts, so I’m giving this one some attention. I’m especially playing with the US graphs, which are most interesting indeed.