Stable and Reliable Monthly Repeat Rent Indices: A Robust Approach

Kris Boudt and Koen Inghelbrecht
Additional contact information
Koen Inghelbrecht: -

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: Repeat rent indices measure changes in rent prices over time by tracking the same rental units across different lease periods, thereby isolating pure rent inflation unaffected by shifts in housing quality or composition. Their main advantage is that they accurately capture the endof-month cost of private tenancy without requiring additional information on dwelling characteristics. This explains their popularity as an input for the calculation of the consumer price index. A disadvantage is that their traditional implementation using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation at a monthly frequency shows high sensitivity to revisions as the information in newly signed contracts require updating the prior rent evolution. In an extensive application to Belgian rent price data, we find that, using a robust M-estimator in combination with lease signature dates results in indices that share the same trend, but display significantly lower revision variability than the standard OLS-based indices.

Keywords: Repeat Rent Index; Robust Estimation; Index Revision; Monthly Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2025-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://wps-feb.ugent.be/Papers/wp_25_1126.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:25/1126

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nathalie Verhaeghe ().