JUE insight: Differences in rent growth by income from 1985 to 2021 and implications for inflation

Abstract

Shelter is a large share of household expenditures and therefore has a large weight in inflation measurement. Because rich and poor households tend to make different housing and location choices, does the shelter component of inflation differ across the income distribution? I calculate rent growth for households in each quintile of the income distribution from 1985 to 2021 and find modestly lower rent growth for lower-income groups. However, because lower-income households spend a larger fraction of total expenditures on housing, I find little difference across groups in headline inflation. Therefore, different housing and location choices have not generated materially different shelter components of inflation across the income distribution.