The paper analyzes the problems of measurement of durable consumer prices posed by quality change. Theoretical price indexes are defined and used to analyze several empirical methods of estimation of quality adjusted price indexes. The paper shows that hedonic regressions and other quality...

Index numbers are used to aggregate detailed information on prices and quantities into scalar measures of price and quantity levels or their growth. The paper reviews four main approaches to bilateral index number theory where two price and quantity vectors are to be aggregated: fixed basket and...

The paper briefly reviews the accomplishments of the Ottawa Group on the occasion of its tenth meeting and then goes on to list ten problem areas in price measurement that have not been completely resolved and hence should be a focus of future meetings. The ten problem areas are: (1) the...

Statistical offices try to match item models when measuring inflation between two periods. However, for product areas with a high turnover of differentiated models, the use of hedonic indexes is more appropriate since they include the prices and quantities of unmatched new and old models. The...

It seems an established empirical fact that Superfund sites lower local property values. Two recent literature reviews (Farber, 1998, Boyle and Kiel, 2001) report that published academic papers on the topic verify that point. The EPA’s approach assumes that all sites negatively impact property...

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the...

In this paper we focus on tenant rents in Italy and compare results from several methods for the rent dynamic estimation. We first document the sources of data available and then introduce quality adjusted techniques, which enable us to separate the price variation due to qualitative changes in...

In this Chapter, we critically review the sizable literature that values school quality and performance through housing valuations. While highly variable in terms of research quality, the literature consistently finds housing valuations to be significantly higher in places where measured school...

In this paper we focus on tenant rents in Italy and compare results from several methods for the rent dynamic estimation. We first document the sources of data available and then introduce quality-adjusted techniques, which enable us to separate the price variation due to qualitative changes in...

The paper uses data on sales of detached houses in a small Dutch town over 14 quarters starting at the first quarter of 2005 in order to compare various methods for constructing a house price index over this period. Four classes of methods are considered: (i) stratification techniques plus...