Housing Allowance Demand Experiment Hedonic Indices as a Measure of Housing Quality

The major purpose of this paper is to develop an important summary measure of housing based on hedonic indices. The analysis of changes in housing 18 a central issue 10 the Demand Experiment. There is, however, no generally agreed upon measure of housing and housing qual1ty. This paper assesses alternative measures of housing and proposes a general measure of housing based on estimated hedonic indices for use 10 later analysis. Hedonic indices relate rent to measures of housing characteristics and thus provide one way of aggregating the many characteristics into an overall index of quality. There are several reasons why this approach is especially useful to the analysis of the Demand Experiment.