HOW MUCH DO HOME OWNERS PAY FOR THE SERVI CES OF THEIR DWELLING

The question of how much one has to pay for living in one's own dwelli ng through 1 year is, surprisingly, not easy to calculate. It is surpr ising because an understanding of this is important both in analyses o f housing demand and in general analyses of welfare on a household lev el. In the literature one often uses either a measure of the user cost : of housing capital or a measure of the housing expenses. We note tha t the definitions of the concept housing expenses differ among differe nt authors. Furthermore, the interaction between tax payments and some of the components of housing expenses is ignored; we integrate the ta x system in our concept of housing expenses. In the article the conten ts of the user cost and the housing expenses are compared. This compar ison leads: us to define a new measure of how much one has to pay for living in one's own dwelling through 1 year. This measure can be denot ed a non-myopic user cost of housing capital. As an illustration of th e discussion of the different ways of measuring the cost of housing co nsumption and their contents we have compared the costs of the housing consumption for households in similar dwellings in two parts of Oslo, using different concepts. We have also shown that date of purchase du ring the period we are considering is a more important determinant of the cost of housing consumption than in which part of the town the dwe lling is situated.