Housing Rents and Inflation Rates.

This paper develops a quality‐adjusted measure of marginal housing rents using a monthly statistic of landlord net rental income. The marginal rent index (MRI) exhibits deflation during recessions and leads the official rent index by 7 months. The modified inflation rate based on MRI suggests that the annual official inflation rate was overestimated by 1.7–4.1% during the Great Recession but underestimated by 0.3–0.7% during the subsequent expansionary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]