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https://umich.zoom.us/j/96393804480?pwd=ajnQfFv3GaVabRiIGyHpos27HLirqQ.1&jst=2
Meeting ID: 963 9380 4480
Passcode: 74720

Abstract:
This seminar will present early results and the long-term aims of the RESET Demonstration Project, an initiative that constructs price and sales indices using item-level transaction data. The project’s overarching goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of leveraging modern transaction data for economic measurement, pointing toward a future in which official economic statistics are rebuilt using 21st-century data and technology. The seminar will present new measures of food-at-home inflation and evaluate them on two fronts: how they compare to current official statistics and what they offer as novel measures that more accurately capture the dynamics of consumer choice. It will also address the challenges of producing reliable and credible official statistics from item-level transaction data.

The RESET Project is supported by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2016-7227, G-2021-16821, G-2025-25236, G-2025-25273) and the National Science Foundation (2537470). The methodology and early results presented in this seminar are reported in “Early results from the RESET demonstration project: Inflation in food at home” Journal of Monetary Economics (In Press): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmoneco.2026.103991

Bio:
Matthew Shapiro is the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics and a Research Professor in the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. His general area of expertise is macroeconomics. His current work focuses on reengineering official economic statistics through his leadership of the Re-Engineering Statistics Using Economic Transactions (RESET) Project and the Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI) at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Shapiro has a career-long interest in official statistics. He has served as chair of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC)—the official advisory committee for the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis—as well as chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Statistics (AEAStat) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT). Shapiro currently chairs the Academic Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, Shapiro was a faculty member at Yale University. He has twice served on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was coeditor of the American Economic Review and editor of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. His administrative appointments at the University of Michigan have included chair of the Department of Economics and director of the Survey Research Center.