Alternate Consumer Price Inflation Data

The shutdown of parts of the U.S. government is causing some minor inconveniences to people who use economic data generated by several of the agencies that have been shuttered because the U.S. Congress hasn’t authorized funding for them.

One example came and went last week, when the jobs report for September 2025 went unpublished because the Bureau of Labor Statistics is one of the shuttered agencies. Fortunately, there is an alternate source for much of the data that report contains.

Another example of BLS data that’s at risk of going unpublished is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) news release for September 2025. Data for this report was collected during the week containing the 12th of September and if the BLS were open, would be released on 15 October 2025. There is however a very good chance the BLS will still be closed when this date rolls around.

That matters because the CPI says about inflation in the U.S. can impact how and when the Federal Reserve might act to change interest rates. That in turn can affect how stock and bond prices change.

Fortunately, like the BLS’ nonfarm employment data, there is an alternative to the BLS’ CPI data! The Billion Prices Project was developed by Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon back in 2008. Ten years later, the project had evolved into PriceStats, which partnered with the investment house State Street, which makes that data available to its clients.

That’s one path to get high quality inflation data that parallels the BLS’ CPI data. Another path to the data is provided by Cavallo through Harvard Business School’s Pricing Lab. On that count, Cavallo and Gaston Garcia Zavaleta published a NBER working paper last month that features the following chart showing how the modern incarnation of PriceStats data compares with the Consumer Price Index in the period from January 2021 through July 2025:

What this chart shows is that aside from whatever prompted the BLS’ CPI measure to jump in value around and after July 2022, the two measures closely parallel each other. That makes the PriceStats data very useful for anticipating what the CPI value will be. What’s more, because its updated daily and because its data doesn’t rely on the BLS to collect it, PriceStats data arguably could and should replace the BLS’ consumer price inflation data for most practical applications.

Once again, we find that analysts have a solid alternative to important economic data because there is a high quality private sector alternative to the BLS’ “official” data. The important takeaway here is that if the data is important enough, people who value it will find ways to get better and more timely versions of it.

References

Alberto Cavallo and Gaston Garcia Zavaleta. Turning Points in Inflation: A Structural Breaks Approach with Micro Data. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 34102. DOI: 10.3386/w34102. [Ungated PDF document]. 21 September 2025.