(i.e., the role of the landlord), then when she does not own it (i.e. the role of the tenant). This would suggest that the second version of the question (WTP), may mitigate the possibility of misreporting due to sentimental attachment to the property. In the selected surveys, we observe both types of self-assessed rent questions previously discussed. In particular, in the case of Albania and Peru, the questionnaire uses the first version: (a) “ _Assume that you want to rent [out] this dwelling what would be a monthly rent you will be able [to] ask for? If you rented out this dwelling, how much do you think you would make?_ ”, respectively. In the case of Iraq, the instrument uses the second version: (b) “ _How much would you pay if you were to rent a dwelling similar to the one you are currently living in?_ ”<sup>11</sup> For the reason explained above, we expect that the question as it is asked in Iraq is likely to mitigate the possibility of misreporting due to sentimental attachment to the property, while in Albania and Peru selfassessment might be inflated. Table 2 reports questions asked in each country and year.

As noted by Deaton and Zaidi (2002, 37), rental value from self-assessment _must be treated with caution and carefully inspected prior to use_ , as home-owners might not have a precise idea of the market value of their dwelling. The scope of this analysis is to illustrate whether and to what extent different methods can lead to different poverty and inequality estimates. Therefore, we do not ascertain the accuracy of self-reported rental values by homeowners and non-market tenants. Ceriani, Olivieri and Ranzani (2019) test the accuracy of home-owners’ selfassessed rental value in an application to Peruvian data.

# **4. Results**

In this section, we analyze the distributional impact of including the flow of services from dwellings in the consumption aggregate using data from four developing countries: Albania, Bangladesh, Iraq and Peru. We measure the effect on different outcomes including inequality and poverty indices, profiling of the poor and shared prosperity by comparing consumption aggregates without the housing component with aggregates that include rental values imputed by means of one of the two approaches described above.

This section summarizes the distributional impact of including rents in the consumption aggregates of the selected countries, differentiating between (i) the baseline scenario, with no rent, and two rent-imputation methods: (ii-a) self-assessment and (ii-b) log-linear hedonic model.<sup>12</sup> We start off by illustrating the relevance of the housing component as a share of the total consumption aggregate on average and along the distribution (by quintile of the original welfare indicator) (Table 4). On average, rents’ shares range from a minimum of 4.8 percent of total per capita household welfare (Bangladesh, 2010, self-assessment imputation method) to a maximum of 22.7 percent (Albania 2008, log-linear imputation method). In Albania and Iraq, two upper-middle income countries, housing contributes about 20 percent of total household consumption. Yet, we cannot generalize this result to upper-middle income countries since Peru exhibits a rent share of 14 percent maximum. Rent shares vary according to the rent imputation method. In line with the expectation associated with the type of question used to collect self-assessed rental values, Albania is the only country where on average rental shares based on self-assessment are higher than those obtained with a log-linear model. However, this does not hold all along the distribution: the log-linear approach produces higher rent shares in the bottom three deciles. A similar pattern is recognizable in Bangladesh (2005), although the differences between the two imputation methods are smaller than in the case of Albania. In the case of Peru, under both methods, and in the case of Albania and Bangladesh, under the self-assessment approach, rent shares increase along the distribution. This is in line with findings from Blades (2009), whereby the share of housing in total consumption is positively correlated with GDP per capita. However, in the case

> 11 Bangladesh’s questionnaire does not specify the type of question asked by the enumerators.

> 12 Results of the log-linear hedonic models are reported in the Appendix.

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