Home Maintenance and Investment Decisions

The owned home is often the largest asset in a household's portfolio. To maintain its value, the home requires continual reinvestment, and a homeowner can increase its value through renovations and additions. Empirical research on these home maintenance and investment decisions of the household has relied almost exclusively on the American Housing Survey (AHS). The research presented in this article added a new data set to this literature, the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, using quarterly household data from 1984 to the first quarter of 2005. In the article, we first compare results between the AHS and CE Survey using some stylized facts identified in the literature. Then we move beyond this comparison and highlight some strengths of the CE Survey, including the distinct time-series patterns observed in the quarterly data