Imputed rent

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Imputed rent is the rental price an individual would pay for an asset they own. The concept applies to any capital good, but it is most commonly used in housing markets to measure the rent homeowners would pay for a housing unit equivalent to the one they own. Imputing housing rent is necessary to measure economic activity in national accounts. Because asset owners do not pay rent, owners' imputed rent must be measured indirectly.

Contents

Imputed housing rent is the economic theory of imputation applied to real estate: that the value is more a matter of what the buyer is willing to pay than the cost the seller incurs to create it. In this case, market rents are used to estimate the value to the property owner. Thus, imputed rent offers a way to compare homeowners' and tenants' economic decisions.

More formally, in owner-occupancy, the landlordtenant relationship is short-circuited. Consider a model: two people, A and B, each of whom owns property. If A lives in B's property, and B lives in A's, two financial transactions take place: each pays rent to the other. But if A and B are both owner-occupiers, no money changes hands even though the same economic relationships exists; there are still two owners and two occupiers, but the transactions between them no longer go through the market. The amount that would have changed hands had the owner and occupier been different persons is the imputed rent. Imputed rents can alternatively be understood as returns to investments in assets. On these grounds, imputed rents might be included in disposable income, e.g. when calculating indices of income distribution.

Measurement

There are two common approaches to estimating imputed rents for housing: the "comparison approach" and the "user cost of capital" approach.

Comparison approach

The comparison approach matches rents in tenant-occupied housing units to similar owner-occupied housing units. If the units are identical, the owner-occupant's imputed rent is the cost they avoid in renting the other unit.

In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a version of this approach to estimate changes in the price of owner-occupied housing. [1]

User cost of capital approach

The user cost approach identifies costs unrecoverable by the owner. These can be defined as:

Where i is the interest rate, rp is the property tax rate, m is the cost of maintenance, and d is depreciation. The rent is the sum of these rates multiplied by the price of the house, [2] PH. More detailed user cost models consider differential interest costs for housing debt and owner equity and the tax treatment of housing capital income. [3]

Effects of owner-occupancy

In population datasets like the Cross-National Equivalent File, imputed rent is estimated:

Extending the principle

If imputed rent can be applied to housing, it can likewise apply to any good that can be rented, including automobiles and furniture: "In principle, the BEA[ clarification needed ] should also include imputed rent for things like cars, and even furniture, but compared to housing, it’s such a small part of the economy that it’s not worth the effort." [5]

See also

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References

  1. "Measuring Price Change in the CPI: Rent and Rental Equivalence". U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 8 September 2023. Retrieved 6 October 2023.
  2. Poterba, James (1992). "Taxation and Housing: Old Questions, New Answers" (PDF). American Economic Review. 82 (2).
  3. Poterba, James; Sinai, Todd (2008). "Tax Expenditures for Owner-Occupied Housing: Deductions for Property Taxes and Mortgage Interest and the Exclusion of Imputed Rental Income" (PDF). American Economic Review. 98 (2): 84–89. doi:10.1257/aer.98.2.84. JSTOR   29730000.
  4. Bartlett, Bruce (2013-09-03). "Taxing Homeowners as if They Were Landlords" . Retrieved 2013-12-20.
  5. Bobkoff, Dan (2016-10-16). "US homeowners get a huge tax break almost nobody knows about, and it's even part of GDP". Business Insider . Retrieved 2021-10-28.