Working Paper

Measuring housing services inflation


Abstract: Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' methodology for measuring implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. The authors propose cross-checking the BLS statistics by using data on owner-occupied and rental housing from the American Housing Survey. A hedonic approach that explicitly calculates capitalization rates appears to be a feasible one for developing a methodologically consistent measure of the rental cost of owner-occupied housing.

Keywords: Consumer price indexes; Housing;

Access Documents

Authors

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Part of Series: Working Papers

Publication Date: 1999

Number: 99-9