Price Index Measurement Uncertainty

I hope I have you convinced that how a price index is measured influences what we think of as the rock solid concept of real GDP. And, of course, there's the selection bias issue with price indices mentioned in the Barro text.

Now we've got a new problem. The Carson Report posts that the BLS is "Missing Prices: Half of the CPI IS Based on Imputed Price".

Since the pandemic, the standard practice of personal visits, which historically accounted for three-fourths of price quotes, was temporarily discontinued. Instead, price data was obtained entirely from online sources or through telephone interviews.

It's really bad with data on shelter. The value of owner occupied housing has always been imputed: what we know about houses is their value as real estate, but not how much value the homeowners get out of living there. They impute that from rental data. Except now:

... In the past year, all of the rent data was collected by telephone, far above the two-thirds average. Also, roughly thirty-five percent of rents every month were uncollected. While that sounds high, and it is, before the pandemic uncollected rent response rates ran consistently in the high twenties. 

During the pandemic, a record number of rents were unpaid. Still, data collectors classified due rents as fully paid if the landlord "expect payment in full, regardless of when." 

With no proof of current or future payment, word-of-mouth rents are included in the CPI to estimate primary residence rents and implied rents for owner housing. But house prices based on actual transactions, with proof of payment, are not.

The value of owner occupied housing has always been imputed: what we know about houses is their value as real estate, but not how much value the homeowners get out of living there. They impute that from rental data.