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Working Paper
Location, Location, Structure Type: Rent Divergence within Neighborhoods
Housing rents are a large share of household budgets and make a large contribution to overall inflation. Rent inflation rates for different types of housing units sometimes diverge, even in the same neighborhoods. We estimate during 2013 to 2016 apartment rents outpaced rents for detached housing in the United States by 0.76 percentage points annually after controlling for location effects. These rent dynamics imply a segmented housing market. They also suggest rent indexes need to be based on data structurally representative of their measurement objective. In particular, indexes based on ...
Working Paper
Prices for Communications Equipment: Rewriting the Record
Communication equipment plays as large a role in high-tech investment as computers, yet prices for communication equipment have not been studied as extensively as prices for computers and electronic components. Prices for satellites, cell phones, and the ground stations for these systems--important components of a nation's communications infrastructure--are difficult to locate in official statistics. This paper develops new price measures for 16 types of communications equipment from 1963 to 2009. Indexes for some (e.g., cellular phone systems) experience declines of 15-20 percent per year, ...