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Working Paper

Measuring Housing Services Inflation

Theodore M. Crone &
Leonard Nakamura

Revised: February 2000

WP 99-09/R – Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' methodology for measuring implicit rents for owner-occupied housing.

A previous version of this paper was originally published in 1999.

The authors propose cross-checking the BLS statistics by using data on owner-occupied and rental housing from the American Housing Survey. A hedonic approach that explicitly calculates capitalization rates appears to be a feasible one for developing a methodologically consistent measure of the rental cost of owner-occupied housing.

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