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A formal framework for hedonic elementary price indices |

The article “A formal framework for hedonic elementary price indices” published online on 22 February 2017 in AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis is what I would call the essence of my research on price indices. I had prepared a first version of this text together with my late doctoral supervisor Hans Wolfgang Brachinger when I was finishing off my PhD thesis in autumn 2006. We submitted it for publication to the Journal of Econometrics (JoE). After several months, we received a response from the editor in charge in June 2007 saying that the readers found our paper “to be quite interesting in many respects”. However, they also indicated “an important need for revision”. Amongst other points, they requested from us to add an empirical application.

Me being busy with my new job in the industry and H. W. Brachinger with other scientific projects, it took us a while to thoroughly revise the text taking into account the criticism received by the referees. We managed to do so only by May 2009 when we were given the opportunity to present the revised paper as a room document to the 11th meeting of the Ottawa Group on Price Indices in Neuchâtel. Still lacking a real data application, we were not yet able, however, to resubmit it to the JoE.

Only after H. W. Brachinger had passed away in 2011, I made another attempt and asked Olivier Schöni for assistance in appending the missing empirical part. He did so by running an analysis on housing data and integrating it into the text – and he provided further comments and ideas for the theoretical part of the paper as well. This work done, we finally resubmitted the paper to the JoE in October 2012, and O. Schöni could use it as a part of his PhD thesis.

Unfortunately, the editors of the JoE had changed in between, and the new ones let us know after two full years (i.e. in November 2014) that the paper was not a good match for the Journal of Econometrics (any more). After some reflection, we took H. W. Brachinger’s forthcoming 5th death anniversary in 2016 as an occasion to start the publication process over again by submitting the paper to the AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis. After some further changes as suggested by the AStA referees, I am glad that the paper has finally been accepted for publication.

The final publication is available at link.springer.com. A full-text view-only version is available here.