IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpwp/01-8.html

Measuring American rents: a revisionist history

Author

Listed:
  • Theodore M. Crone
  • Leonard I. Nakamura
  • Richard Voith

Abstract

Until the end of 1977, the method used to measure changes in rent of primary residence in the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) tended to omit price changes when units changed tenants or were temporarily vacant. Since such units typically had more rapid increases in rents than average units, omitting them biased inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that reduced this bias. The authors use data from the American Housing Survey to check the success of the corrections. They compare estimates of the historical series adjusted for the BLS changes in methodology with a new hedonic estimate of changes in rental rates. The authors conclude that from 1940 to 1977 the CPI for rent would have been about 60 percent higher if current BLS practices had been used ? between 1.3 and 3.5 percentage points. Even after the corrections have been made, the authors' hedonic estimates suggest that the current CPI methodology may still understate the rental inflation rate by one-half to 1 percentage point.

Suggested Citation

  • Theodore M. Crone & Leonard I. Nakamura & Richard Voith, 2001. "Measuring American rents: a revisionist history," Working Papers 01-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:01-8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2001/wp01-8.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Linneman, Peter & Voith, Richard, 1991. "Housing price functions and ownership capitalization rates," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 100-111, July.
    2. Linneman, Peter, 1980. "Some empirical results on the nature of the hedonic price function for the urban housing market," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 47-68, July.
    3. David Genesove, 2003. "The Nominal Rigidity of Apartment Rents," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 85(4), pages 844-853, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Eichholtz, Piet & Straetmans, Stefan & Theebe, Marcel, 2012. "The Amsterdam rent index: The housing market and the economy, 1550–1850," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(4), pages 269-282.
    2. Kurz, Claudia & Hoffmann, Johannes, 2004. "A rental-equivalence index for owner-occupied housing in West Germany 1985 to 1998," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2004,08, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    3. Theodore M. Crone & Leonard I. Nakamura & Richard Voith, 2010. "Rents Have Been Rising, Not Falling, in the Postwar Period," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(3), pages 628-642, August.
    4. Richard A. Ashley & Randall J. Verbrugge., 2006. "Mis-Specification in Phillips Curve Regressions: Quantifying Frequency Dependence in This Relationship While Allowing for Feedback," Working Papers e06-11, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Theodore M. Crone & Leonard I. Nakamura & Richard Voith, 1998. "Measuring housing services inflation," Working Papers 98-21, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    2. Theodore M. Crone & Leonard I. Nakamura & Richard Voith, 2004. "Hedonic estimates of the cost of housing services: rental and owner-occupied units," Working Papers 04-22, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    3. Kurz, Claudia & Hoffmann, Johannes, 2004. "A rental-equivalence index for owner-occupied housing in West Germany 1985 to 1998," Discussion Paper Series 1: Economic Studies 2004,08, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    4. Philippe Bracke, 2015. "House Prices and Rents: Microevidence from a Matched Data Set in Central London," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 43(2), pages 403-431, June.
    5. Levy, Daniel & Müller, Georg & Chen, Haipeng (Allan) & Bergen, Mark & Dutta, Shantanu, 2010. "Holiday Price Rigidity and Cost of Price Adjustment," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 77(305), pages 172-198.
    6. Damian S. Damianov & Diego Escobari, 2021. "Getting on and Moving Up the Property Ladder: Real Hedging in the U.S. Housing Market Before and After the Crisis," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 49(4), pages 1201-1237, December.
    7. Peter D. Linneman & Isaac F. Megbolugbe, 1992. "Housing Affordability: Myth or Reality?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 29(3-4), pages 369-392, May.
    8. Isaac F. Megbolugbe, 1991. "Hedonic Indices and Housing Programme Benefits," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 28(5), pages 773-781, October.
    9. Thomas A. Stephens & Jean-Robert Tyran, 2012. "“At least I didn’t lose money” - Nominal Loss Aversion Shapes Evaluations of Housing Transactions," Discussion Papers 12-14, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics.
    10. Robert Poole & Randal Verbrugge, 2007. "Explaining the Rent-OER Inflation Divergence, 1999-2006," Working Papers 410, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
    11. Sevestre, Patrick & Baudry, Laurent & Le Bihan, Hervé & Tarrieu, Sylvie, 2004. "Price rigidity. Evidence from the French CPI micro-data," Working Paper Series 384, European Central Bank.
    12. Serim Huh & Seung-Jun Kwak, 1997. "The Choice of Functional Form and Variables in the Hedonic Price Model in Seoul," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 34(7), pages 989-998, June.
    13. Theodore M. Crone, 2006. "Capitalization of the quality of local public schools: what do home buyers value?," Working Papers 06-15, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    14. Aysoy, Cem & Aysoy, Cevriye & Tumen, Semih, 2014. "Quantifying and explaining stickiness in housing rents: A Turkish case study with micro-level data," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 62-74.
    15. Young, Andrew T. & Levy, Daniel, 2014. "Explicit Evidence of an Implicit Contract," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 30(4), pages 804-832.
    16. Emmanuel Dhyne & Luis J. Alvarez & Herve Le Bihan & Giovanni Veronese & Daniel Dias & Johannes Hoffmann & Nicole Jonker & Patrick Lunnemann & Fabio Rumler & Jouko Vilmunen, 2006. "Price Changes in the Euro Area and the United States: Some Facts from Individual Consumer Price Data," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 20(2), pages 171-192, Spring.
    17. Zhang, Congwen & Boyle, Kevin J. & Kuminoff, Nicolai V., 2015. "Partial identification of amenity demand functions," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 180-197.
    18. Edwards, Steven F. & Anderson, Glen D., 1984. "Land Use Conflicts in the Coastal Zone: An Approach for the Analysis of the Opportunity Costs of Protecting Coastal Resources," Journal of the Northeastern Agricultural Economics Council, Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association, vol. 13(01), pages 1-9, April.
    19. Isaac F. Megbolugbe, 1989. "A Hedonic Index Model: The Housing Market of Jos, Nigeria," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 26(5), pages 486-494, October.
    20. John D. Benjamin & G. Stacy Sirmans & Emily Norman Zietz, 1997. "Security Measures and the Apartment Market," Journal of Real Estate Research, American Real Estate Society, vol. 14(3), pages 347-358.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    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:fip:fedpwp:01-8. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Beth Paul (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbphus.html .

    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.