The Consumer Price Index Housing Sample

An address based sample

Robert PooleOffice of Prices and Living Conditions

Bureau of Labor Statistics

CPI Housing Sample Overview

Used to estimate inflation for Rent and Owners’ Equivalent Rent – the value of the flow of services one receives from an owned home

One sample of renters is used to move both rent and OER

Some Select Sample Details

Cluster sampling is used Sample segments (neighborhoods)

based on total housing expenditure Sample households within each

segment with equal probability

Ooooh! More Details Renters are implicitly matched to

owners geographically by neighborhood

Assumption that the Rent change in a neighborhood is the same as the unobservable Owners’ Equivalent Rent change

No assumption is made about price levels

Sampling Details: Minutiae

Just kidding!

1998 Revision Sample

Our segments were census block based

Used a manual address listing process for each segment – very costly

Renters difficult to find in high owner density neighborhoods

“Current” Sample

Our segments are now census block group based

Expect 4.5 times the number of addresses per segment

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead – renters in high owner density areas still hard to find

Cost

Hmmm. How can we make the listing process manageable and cheaper?

ADDRESS LISTS!!!! But wait …

Address List Issues

Coverage – are all the households in an area on the lists?

Accuracy – are the addresses geocoded accurately?

Coverage

Multi-unit structures can have but one delivery point in the Delivery Sequence File

DSF augmented with marketing lists

Tested for bias in price change associated with “missing” addresses – none found

Geocoding Accuracy

Compared list geocoding with census geocoding

Rob’s bout of swine flu prevented him from digging up numbers about the accuracy in time for this presentation. It was good. Trust him.

Accuracy on par with manual listing

What about them pesky, hard to find renters? Hey! We’re using marketing lists!

Can they help? Binary renter/owner coding not very

helpful Sliding scale renter/owner coding

was very helpful in identifying “certainty” owners – over 98% helpful

Oh yeah! (knock on wood)

Address List Advantages

Cheaper than listing Owner/Renter information allowed

us to effectively double our sample size

Phone Numbers – Too early to tell Names – A possibility for the future

Questions?