Measurement of Housing and the Housing Sector - CRIW/NBER Conference

Housing is one of the most important sectors of the US economy. Rents and house prices are salient measures of the cost of living for many households. Rising prices for owner-occupied homes have attracted widespread attention, in economics and more broadly, over the past decade, and several explanations have been advanced to explain this phenomenon. The multi-family housing markets and the rental market for single-family homes, which is becoming increasingly important, are also drawing interest. Many analyses suggest that the US faces a gap between the demand for and supply of housing units, but aggregate statistics conceal important variation across places. Housing supply dynamics, the construction of single-family and multi-family units, are a key determinant of market outcomes. The relative importance of land markets, government regulations, labor markets, and materials costs in affecting the number of new units brought to market remains an open question. 

Interest in the housing sector has increased in recent years due to a combination of factors. One is a growing sense that affordability challenges are becoming widespread in many places and across both the owner-occupied and rental markets. The percentage of households spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing has increased over the past 25 years, with 50 percent of renters now experiencing this burden. Additionally, housing insecurity and homelessness have also increased. The economic shocks associated with the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have affected both housing supply and housing demand. The recent rise in measured inflation has renewed debate on how well housing costs are measured in general and at different points in time. Gaps in data, as well as measurement challenges, limit our understanding of the scale of these issues and their implications for households, firms, and the public sector.

To advance research on these and other issues related to the production of meaningful, innovative, and timely statistics that capture the workings of housing markets and the experiences of individuals, households or firms, the Conference on Research on Income and Wealth (CRIW) and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) will convene a meeting on March 12–13, 2026, in Washington, DC. The conference will be organized by Thesia I. Garner (US Bureau of Labor Statistics), Joe Gyourko (University of Pennsylvania and NBER) and Sonya R. Porter (US Census Bureau). The meeting will provide a venue for economists, sociologists, statisticians, and other researchers studying housing and housing markets from positions in government, academia, business, and the non-profit sector to present and discuss new research on measuring housing and the housing market, as well as research that estimates key behavioral relationships. 

The conference organizers welcome research papers and extended abstracts for papers that would be completed by March 2026. Papers may explore, among other issues, measuring the price and quantity of the stock of single-family and multi-family housing units, the elasticity of supply of new units, the determinants and importance of conversions of structures from other uses to residential deployment, the effect of the housing sector on the broader macro-economy, the relationship of house price movements and the movement of other elements in the economy, updating the measurement of the different components of the user cost of housing with special emphasis on insurance costs, especially as they relate to natural disasters such as floods or hurricanes, decomposing the total cost of housing as a function of the housing bundle which is a combination of physical and locational characteristics, the role of housing in inequality and poverty analyses, socioeconomic and demographic disparities in housing, housing insecurity, the impact of housing programs, measuring housing wealth, environmental impacts on housing, the labor market for construction workers, the measurement of productivity, and the impact of regulation. Particular consideration will be given to papers addressing what can be measured, and what can be done with these measurements. 

Please upload research papers and extended abstracts by 11:59pm EST on Thursday, March 13, 2025.

Extended abstracts should explain what the project will study, how it fits into the previous literature, and what data and methods will be used. Papers that have been accepted for journal publication are not eligible for consideration. The organizers encourage submissions from scholars who are early in their careers, who are not NBER affiliates, and who are from groups that are under-represented in the economics profession. They also welcome submissions from researchers affiliated with colleges and universities, private firms, and research institutes, as well as from those working in the public sector.

Decisions about which papers will be included on the program will be made by April 18, 2025. Authors selected to present papers will be invited to a pre-conference which to be held later this year. Each paper presented at the research conference will receive input and feedback from an assigned discussant. 

The papers presented at the conference will become part of an NBER/CRIW conference volume to be published by the University of Chicago Press (UCP). All papers will be subject to review by the editors and referees from the NBER and the UCP. Final versions of conference papers will be due approximately one month prior to the conference date. 

The NBER will cover economy class travel and hotel expenses for one author per paper for both the pre-conference and the conference. Questions about this conference may be addressed to confer@nber.org.