Disequilibrium in the housing market can be detected by comparing the actual price-rent ratio with its equilibrium counterpart obtained from the user-cost condition. Empirical implementation of this idea, however, is problematic because of quality differences between sold and rented dwellings....

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...

The U.S. inflation measures, such as the Consumer Price Index, are adjusted for rent depreciation based on a 1988 estimate. This study estimates rent depreciation by using a novel rental-listing data set for the Las Vegas metropolitan area. The average annual depreciation rate is 0.2 percent for...

There is a debate whether the federal funds rate deviated from the Taylor rule. We present evidence that standard inflation measures do not reflect the contemporaneous state of housing rents, which is a large part of consumption. Using a new housing rent index (RRI) developed by Ambrose et al....