Metodologie per la stima degli affitti figurativi ed impatto sulla distribuzione del reddito

In the relevant literature it is well established that imputed rents – a non-monetary income source for all households whose living accommodation is not rented at a market price - has to be accounted for in order to provide a more accurate and comparable measure of the total disposable household income. A more controversial issue is about the choice among distinct estimation approaches and how to operationalise them. This paper aims to analyse the impact of different estimation methods for imputed rents on the distribution of disposable income as well as on inequality measures, using data from EUSILC. Subjective rents – self-assessed values by the respondents - are compared with predicted values coming from econometric techniques, i.e. an hedonic regression model,being both methods coherent with the ‘rental equivalence value’ approach. Three main issues are assessed: i) pros and cons of each method; ii) if the tenure discount (the length of tenure), which turns to be a relevant factor in determining the observed values of the market rents, has to be taken into explicit account in predicting imputed rents; iii) how to prevent biases on model predictions eventually arising if a selection process between tenants at a market price and households living with different accommodation occurs.