LLM Reconstructs a Century of US Consumer Price Index
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-07-20
Research: Reconstructing a Century of US Living Standard Growth with LLMs
This working paper uses 5.1 million product records from Sears catalogs to build a quality-adjusted price index spanning 1900–1990, offering a more granular measure of real living standard changes for US consumer goods in the 20th century.
The authors draw two core conclusions:
- US economic growth in the 20th century was higher than estimated by official or traditional methods;
- The primary peaks of this growth occurred before World War II, rather than after.
The sharer highlights that the real breakthrough of this study is using LLMs as data engineering tools to create a hedonic price index from massive historical catalog data.
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