IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jnlbes/v30y2012i1p143-148.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do the Consumer Price Index's Utilities Adjustments for Owners’ Equivalent Rent Distort Inflation Measurement?

Author

Listed:
  • Randal Verbrugge

Abstract

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is an important social index number, central to monetary policy, well being measurement, optimal pricing, and tax and contract escalation. Shelter costs have a large weight in the CPI, so their movements receive much attention. The CPI incorporates two shelter indexes: Rent, covering renters, and Owners’ Equivalent Rent (OER), covering owners. Between 1999 and 2006, Rent and OER inflation twice diverged markedly; this occurred again recently. Because these indexes share a common data source—a large sample of market rents—such divergence often prompts questions about CPI methods, particularly the OER utilities adjustment. (This adjustment is necessary to produce an unbiased OER index, because many market rents include utilities, but OER is a rent-of-shelter concept.) The utilities adjustment procedure is no smoking gun. It was not the major cause of these divergences, and it generates no long-run inflation measurement bias. Nonetheless, it increases OER inflation volatility and can drive OER inflation far from its measurement goal in the short run. This article develops a theory of utilities adjustment and outlines a straightforward improvement of Bureau of Labor Statistics procedures that eliminates their undesirable properties. The short-run impact on inflation measurement can be very sizable.

Suggested Citation

  • Randal Verbrugge, 2012. "Do the Consumer Price Index's Utilities Adjustments for Owners’ Equivalent Rent Distort Inflation Measurement?," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(1), pages 143-148.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jnlbes:v:30:y:2012:i:1:p:143-148
    DOI: 10.1198/jbes.2011.08016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1198/jbes.2011.08016
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1198/jbes.2011.08016?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brian Adams & Randal Verbrugge, 2020. "Location, Location, Structure Type: Rent Divergence within Neighborhoods," Economic Working Papers 533, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    2. Wang, Minggang & Tian, Lixin & Xu, Hua & Li, Weiyu & Du, Ruijin & Dong, Gaogao & Wang, Jie & Gu, Jiani, 2017. "Systemic risk and spatiotemporal dynamics of the consumer market of China," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 473(C), pages 188-204.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jnlbes:v:30:y:2012:i:1:p:143-148. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/UBES20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.