In this paper we develop a measure of current "expenditures" on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective...

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare...

The Hamilton method for estimating CPI bias is simple, intuitive, and has been widely adopted. We show that the method confiates CPI bias with variation in cost-of-living across income levels. Assuming a single price index across the income distribution is inconsistent with the downward sloping...

This paper presents an indirect approach to investigate the possible existence of measurement error bias in the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices for the UK and Italy. Our empirical results show that there is no significant evidence for a bias in the UK, nor for Italy prior to the introduction...

In this paper we develop a measure of current expenditures on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective...

We document that home ownership of households with "heads" aged 25-44 years fell substantially between 1980 and 2000 and recovered only partially during the 2001{2005 housing boom. The 1980{2000 decline in young home ownership occurred as improvements in mortgage opportunities made it easier to...

This article deals with income advantages derived from owner-occupied housing and their impact on the personal income distribution. Using micro-data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we find...