Rising wealth inequality has spurred an increased interest in understanding how and why wealth is correlated across generations. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth driven by home price changes in different areas to isolate the causal impact of parental housing wealth...

“Right to Buy” (RTB) was a large-scale UK housing policy whereby incumbent tenants in public housing could buy their properties at heavily subsidised prices. The policy increased the national homeownership rate by over 10 percentage points between 1980 and the late 1990s. A key feature of...

A wide range of aggregate data is used to examine the spatial variation in homeownership rates among a cross-section of 96 German planning regions. The analysis accounts for potential endogeneity of prices and affordability as well as for spatial dependence in homeownership levels. In addition...

In a number of papers A.J. Oswald (1996, 1997) argues that high rates of home ownership may imply inferior labour market outcomes. This paper tests the Oswald hypothesis in a panel of 42 Belgian districts since the 1970s. The use of data going back to 1970 allows us to embed the Oswald...

We study the link between homeownership, mortgage debt, and entrepreneurship using a model of occupational choice and housing tenure where homeowners commit to mortgage payments. Our model predicts that, as long as mortgage rates exceed the rate of interest on liquid wealth: (i) mortgage debt,...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

Provided there are positive external benefits attached to the historic character of buildings, owners of properties in designated conservation areas benefit from a reduction in uncertainty regarding the future of their area. At the same time, the restrictions put in place to ensure the...

This paper provides a novel macroeconomic model that is specifically designed to investigate the evolution of housing wealth. To capture the importance of land as an input factor for housing production and for the evolution of wealth in a growing economy, the analysis builds on three premises:...

It is well known that homeowners are richer than renters, even after controlling for observable characteristics. This is often used as an argument for policies that foster homeownership. However, the causal link between homeownership and wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential...

We develop a dynamic stochastic equilibrium model of two locations within a city where heterogeneous households make joint location and tenure mode decisions. To investigate the effect of homeownership on equilibrium prices and allocations, we compare the response of this model economy to a...