Formally known as the Price Statistics Review Committee, the Stigler Commission was convened in 1961 to study the measurement of inflation

Inflation

In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation also reflects an erosion in the purchasing power of money – a...

 in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Headed by Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 winner George Stigler

George Stigler

George Joseph Stigler was a U.S. economist. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1982, and was a key leader of the Chicago School of Economics, along with his close friend Milton Friedman....

, its mandate was to conduct research into all types of price indices, including the Consumer Price Index

Consumer price index

A consumer price index measures changes in the price level of consumer goods and services purchased by households. The CPI, in the United States is defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as "a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of...

 (CPI). Based on its recommendations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. The BLS is a governmental statistical agency that collects, processes, analyzes, and...

 established a price research division.

The next major commission like it was the Boskin Commission

Boskin Commission

The Boskin Commission, formally called the "Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index", was appointed by the United States Senate in 1995 to study possible bias in the computation of the Consumer Price Index , which is used to measure inflation in the United States...

in 1996, which was solely focused on evaluating the CPI.