Until the end of 1977, the U.S. consumer price index for rents tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant, biasing inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that...

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is the largest supply-side housing subsidy in the United States, costing over $8 billion per year. LIHTC properties tend to be concentrated in low-income urban communities. Numerous studies have examined the spillover effects of these properties but have not...

Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' methodology for measuring rent increases and changes in implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. We compare the BLS estimates of increases in rents and owner-occupied housing costs to regression-based estimates using...

Until the end of 1977, the method used in the U.S. consumer price index (CPI) to measure rent inflation tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant. Since such units typically had more rapid increases in rents than average units, this response bias biased...

The tradeoff between risk and return in equity markets is well established. This paper examines the existence of the same tradeoff in the single-family housing market. For home buyers, who constitute about two-thirds of U.S. households, the choice about how much housing and which house to buy is...

Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' methodology for measuring rent increases and changes in implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. We compare the BLS estimates of increases in rents and owner-occupied housing costs to regression-based estimates using...