Publication: Rent Imputation for Welfare Measurement : A Review of Methodologies and Empirical Findings
Date
2014-11
ISSN
Published
2014-11
Author(s)
Abstract
As well acknowledged in the literature,
housing is often the dominant consumption good for most
households. As such, it should be included in a
comprehensive welfare aggregate to measure people's
living standards accurately. However, assigning a value to
the flow of the dwelling for homeowners and nonmarket
tenants is problematic. Over the last decades several
estimation techniques have been proposed and implemented by
practitioners covering from very simple to sophisticated
approaches. This paper provides an extensive review of
different methods to impute rent, commonly used for welfare
analysis. It also gives an overview of how this problem has
been addressed by other economic domains, namely national
accounts, price indices, purchasing power parities, and
taxation. Finally, after setting up a theoretical framework,
the paper summarizes the empirical findings about the
distributional impact of including imputed rents in welfare aggregates.
Citation
“Balcazar, Carlos Felipe; Ceriani, Lidia; Olivieri, Sergio; Ranzani, Marco. 2014. Rent Imputation for Welfare Measurement : A Review of Methodologies and Empirical Findings. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7103. © World Bank Group, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/20613 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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