The Common-Scaling Social Cost-of-Living Index

If preferences or budgets are heterogeneous across people (as they clearly are), then individual cost-of-living indexes are also heterogeneous. Thus, any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. In this article, we provide a solution to this problem that we call a “common-scaling” social cost-of-living index (CS-SCOLI). In addition, we describe nonparametric methods for estimating such social cost-of-living indexes. As an application, we consider changes in the social cost-of-living in the U.S. between 1988 and 2000.