Greece, Italy and the UK. Additionally, the authors find that the main beneficiaries are outright owners and households in rent-free or subsidized dwellings, which generally coincides with the elderly.

Moreover, Mullan et al. (2007) investigate the distributional impact after accounting for imputed rents in the household disposable income measure in the UK. The authors compare the effects obtained by applying two imputation techniques, a hedonic model and stratification. Although the overall effect is a reduction in inequality, the authors underline the sensitivity of results depending on the particular approach adopted and dataset used.

Törmälehto and Sauli (2010, 2013) analyze the distributional implication of imputed rents from 2007 to 2010 for the 29 countries included in the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions. Again, the data confirm the main results found in the literature: imputed rents decrease relative income inequality. In particular, reduction in inequality is the combined effect of the equalizing gap-effect and dis-equalizing re-ranking effect.

Considering consumption as the welfare measure, Crossley and Curtis (2006) find a significant equalizing effect of rent imputation in a study of child poverty in Canada, between 1986 and 2000. The authors argue that this effect may be due to the low variability of the imputed rent which reduces the dispersion of consumption (on this see also Brzozowski and Crossley, 2011).

In the case of developing countries, Gasparini and Escudero (2004) obtain an equalizing effect of imputed rent in the income distribution of Greater Buenos Aires. This results as a combined effect of a relatively large proportion of house-owners in the lower strata of the income distribution and low income elasticity in housing expenditure. In Madagascar and Côte d’Ivoire, Guenard and Mesple ́-Somps (2010) report the impact on inequality of not taking imputed rent for home-owners into account. Inequality, measured by the Gini index, increases by over 6 percentage points in Madagascar and by 1 percentage point in Côte d’Ivoire. Hence, including imputed rent for home owners would have an equalizing effect on both consumption distributions.

In an isolated study on a socialist country, Buckely and Gurenko (1997) shed light on the housing-based income transfer mechanism of the Soviet regime in Russia. When income is adjusted for housing, inequality decreases significantly.

Few studies focus on the impact on poverty and most of them consider a fixed poverty line. Crossley and Curtis (2006) find a reduction in poverty when including imputed rent in a study of child poverty in Canada, from 1986 to 2000. For instance, the headcount index decreases from 8.85 to 4.44 in 2000. Based on the same dataset but during a different timespan 1997-2009, Norris and Pendakur (2013) study the impact on poverty of different rent-imputation approaches, finding that Heckman selection bias correction reduces the measured level of poverty obtained from OLS imputations. This is due to the fact that although low-consumption owners have only slightly better observed characteristics than their renter counterparts, they have better unobserved dwelling characteristics. Therefore, using OLS imputation would underestimate owners' consumption and consequently overstate their poverty.

Imputed rents have also a poverty-reduction effect for the elderly. This result is consistent independently of considering a fixed poverty line (as in Frick and Grabka, 2003) or an adjusted poverty line based on the distribution of income when imputed rent is added (as in Frick et al., 2010, D’Ambrosio and Gigliarano, 2007 or Törmälehto and Sauli, 2010, 2013). Törmälehto and Sauli (2010, 2013) also 25