Search Results
Journal Article
City and suburban growth: substitutes or complements?
Working Paper
Rents have been rising, not falling, in the postwar period
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 reduced this nonresponse bias, but substantial bias remained until 1985. The authors set up a model of nonresponse bias, parameterize it, and test it using a BLS microdata set for rents. From 1940 to 1985, the official BLS CPI-W price index for tenant rents rose 3.6 percent annually; the authors argue that ...
Journal Article
Central city decline: regional or neighborhood solutions?
The decline of a central city often has economic and social implications for an entire region. But where does the solution lie? Are regional approaches to problems concentrated in central cities warranted? Or should we seek local solutions by transforming cities into a group of smaller, more autonomous communities? Dick Voith looks at some of the issues involved in these questions and suggests that the regional benefits of improving a central city's economy are large
Working Paper
Compensating variation in wages and rents
Working Paper
Measuring housing services inflation
Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? methodology for measuring implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. We propose cross-checking the BLS statistics by using data on owner-occupied and rental housing from the American Housing Survey.