Do the elderly reduce housing equity? An international comparison

We explore the pattern of elderly homeownership using microeconomic surveys of 17 OECD countries. In most countries the survey is repeated over time, permitting construction of an international dataset of repeated cross-sectional data, merging 59 national household surveys on about 300,000 individuals. We find that ownership rates decline considerably after age 60 in most countries. However, a large part of the decline depends on cohort effects. Adjusting for this, we find that ownership rates fall after age 70 by about half a percentage point per year. Interestingly, ownership trajectories are quite similar in all countries – except Finland and Canada - and are not correlated with a wide set of indicators that we examine.