Owner-Occupied Housing and Demand for Risky Financial Assets: Some Finnish Evidence

This paper studies the linkage between owner-occupied housing and portfolio choice. Using a theoretical simulation model with Finnish asset return data we find that a leveraged position in housing has a clear negative effect on the share of stocks in a mean-variance efficient portfolio. The second part of the paper studies how owner-occupied housing actually affects households’ financial portfolios using Finnish household data. The main result indicates that the more valuable house a homeowner resides in, at a given level of net wealth, the less likely it is to own stocks. However, it seems that housing has only a small effect if any on the share of financial assets a household invests in stocks conditional on stockholding.