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....

The International Comparisons Program (ICP) run by the World Bank compares the purchasing power of currencies and real income across countries. Using a unique data set consisting of over 600,000 ICP price quotes drawn from nine countries in the Asia-Pacific region, we consider a number of ways...