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...

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...

Over the past two years, the cost of housing and community amenities has been growing at a moderate rate. Due to financial problems, one in every ten households delayed paying its bills, or paid them only in part. The volume of housing and community amenities payments in arrears remained the...

For modern nations, it is recognized as important that temporal and spatial variations in costs for comparable dwelling services are carefully measured. The costs of owner occupied as well as rental housing have important roles to play in both the consumer price index (CPI) and the System of...

User costs of housing are a major part of a household’s expenditure.I empirically investigate the heterogeneous impact of an unanticipatedexpansionary monetary policy on housing markets and householdtenurial decision by exploiting the user cost of housing channel.Drawing on a Swiss household...