{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T20:29:58Z","timestamp":1786739398075,"version":"build-2736575974"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"group-title":"SSRN","reference-count":0,"publisher":"Elsevier BV","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"abstract":"<jats:p>This paper documents the gap between aggregate consumer price inflation and realised cost-of-living changes during the February 2026 energy supply shock. Using weekly retail fuel prices from the US Energy Information Administration and monthly price indices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I decompose the shock into three channels distinguished by pass-through speed. The direct channel shows retail gasoline and diesel gains of 35.7% and 45.8% in the seven weeks following the shock, against a headline CPI move of 1.0%. Translated into household cost-of-living terms, a household with a 15% fuel budget share experienced an energy-driven inflation contribution of approximately 5.4 percentage points, against headline CPI of 1.0-a wedge of roughly a factor of five. The slow indirect channel-restaurant food, grocery food, public transit, utilities-shows movements below 3.5% consistent with multi-month passthrough lags documented in existing literature. A third channel-platform-mediated delivery and ridehailing services-plausibly exhibits pass-through speeds intermediate between the other two, but is poorly captured by existing inflation measurement methodology. This paper documents the direct-channel wedge empirically, flags the platform-services channel as a measurement frontier, and argues that aggregate CPI during sectoral supply shocks averages across pass-through speeds in ways that suppress welfare-relevant temporal heterogeneity.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.2139\/ssrn.6634363","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,24]],"date-time":"2026-04-24T13:42:44Z","timestamp":1777038164000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Measured vs. Experienced Inflation: A Wedge Decomposition Around the February 2026 Energy Shock"],"prefix":"10.2139","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0005-8477-9393","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Boon Chuan","family":"Lim","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"78","container-title":[],"original-title":[],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,14]],"date-time":"2026-08-14T19:28:40Z","timestamp":1786735720000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.ssrn.com\/abstract=6634363"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2139\/ssrn.6634363","relation":{},"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"subtype":"preprint"}}