A retail price index including the shadow price of owner occupied housing

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. In- stead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a con- sumer welfare perspective, while mortgage interest does capture the cost of a particular service, it does not capture the cost of housing services. The shadow price of housing captures the welfare cost to a household of changes in housing prices. In this paper we create a new shadow price index using RPI data and the shadow price of housing and investigate how replacing the mortgage interest with the shadow price of housing affects measures of the cost of living

Dynamic housing expenditures and household welfare

In this paper we develop a measure of current "expenditures" on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective expenditures equal the "shadow price" of housing services (the marginal rate of substitution between housing services and non-durable consumption) multiplied by the quantity of housing services consumed. In an idealised world, two simple measures of the shadow price are available; the user cost of housing capital and the rental price of an equivalent rental house. However, imperfect capital markets, risk aversion, the tax system, moving costs and systematic differences between houses available in the rental and owner-occupied sectors drive a wedge between the shadow price of housing and these other two measures. This paper contributes to previous research by calibrating a lifecycle model of housing investment and consumption to data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey and by developing measures of the shadow price of housing that take into account uncertainty in house prices, interest rates and incomes, dynamic life cycle choices, and liquidity constraints that depend on both income and house value

Estimating households' willingness to pay

The recent literature has brought together the characteristics model of utility and classic revealed preference arguments to learn about consumers' willingness to pay. We incorporate market pricing equilibrium conditions into this setting. This allows us to use observed purchase prices and quantities on a large basket of products to learn about individual household's willingness to pay for characteristics, while maintaining a high degree of flexibility and also avoiding the biases that arise from inappropriate aggregation. We illustrate the approach using scanner data on food purchases to estimate bounds on willingness to pay for the organic characteristic. We combine these estimates with information on households' stated preferences and beliefs to show that on average quality is the most important factor affecting bounds on household willingness to pay for organic, with health concerns coming second, and environmental concerns lagging far behind.

Household willingness to pay for organic products

We use hedonic prices and purchase quantities to consider what can be learned about household willingness to pay for baskets of organic products and how this varies across households. We use rich scanner data on food purchases by a large number of households to compute household specific lower and upper bounds on willingness to pay for various baskets of organic products. These bounds provide information about willingness to pay for organic without imposing restrictive assumptions on preferences. We show that the reasons households are willing to pay vary, with quality being the most important, health concerns coming second, and environmental concerns lagging far behind. We also show how these methods can be used for example by stores to provide robust upper bounds on the revenue implication of introducing a new line of organic products.

A retail price index including the shadow price of owner occupied housing

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare perspective, while mortgage interest does capture the cost of a particular service, it does not capture the cost of housing services. The shadow price of housing captures the welfare cost to a household of changes in housing prices. In this paper we create a new shadow price index using RPI data and the shadow price of housing and investigate how replacing the mortgage interest with the shadow price of housing affects measures of the cost of living.

Hedonic price equilibria, stable matching, and optimal transport: equivalence, topology, and uniqueness

Hedonic pricing with quasi-linear preferences is shown to be equivalent to stable matching with transferable utilities and a participation constraint, and to an optimal transportation (Monge-Kantorovich) linear programming problem. Optimal assignments in the latter correspond to stable matchings, and to hedonic equilibria. These assignments are shown to exist in great generality; their marginal indirect payoffs with respect to agent type are shown to be unique whenever direct payoffs vary smoothly with type. Under a generalized Spence-Mirrlees condition (also known as a twist condition) the assignments are shown to be unique and to be pure, meaning the matching is one-to-one outside a negligible set. For smooth problems set on compact, connected type spaces such as the circle, there is a topological obstruction to purity, but we give a weaker condition still guaranteeing uniqueness of the stable match

Identification and estimation of hedonic models

This paper considers the identification and estimation of hedonic models. We establish that in an additive version of the hedonic model, technology and preferences are generically nonparametrically identified from data on demand and supply in a single hedonic market. The empirical literature that claims that hedonic models estimated on data from a single market are fundamentally underidentified is based on arbitrary linearizations that do not use all the information in the model. The exact economic model that justifies linear approximations is unappealing. Nonlinearities are generic features of equilibrium in hedonic models and a fundamental and economically motivated source of identification

Identification and estimation of hedonic models

This paper considers the identification and estimation of hedonic models. We establish that technology and preferences in a separable version of the hedonic model are generically identified up to a±ne transformations from data on demand and supply in a single hedonic market. For a very general parametric structure, preferences and technology are fully identified from demand data. Much of the confusion in the empirical literature that claims that hedonic models estimated on data from a single market are fundamentally underidentified is based on linearizations that do not use all of the information in the model. The exact economic model that justifies the linear approximations has strange properties so the approximation is doubly poor. A semiparametric estimation method is proposed, and alternative estimators are considered. Instrumental variables estimators can be applied to identify technology and preference parameters from a single market even though there are no exclusion restrictions.