Although this range happens to coincide with the one I gave two years ago, it does reflect both the improvements in the index that the BLS has implemented since then and the emergence of evidence suggesting that the initial problem was of a slightly greater dimension than had previously been estimated.
This estimate is consistent with a number of microstatistical studies as well as an independently derived macroevaluation by staff at the Federal Reserve Board, which I will discuss shortly. In judging these evaluations, it is incumbent upon us to resist the evident strong inclination to believe that precision is the equivalent of accuracy in price bias estimation.