This paper investigates the determinants of residential mobility of older households (above 50 years old) and the adjustment of housing for those who move employing individual data from the European Community Household Panel. Although homeowners are less likely to move compared to renters, an...

Annuities, long-term care insurance (LTCI), and reverse mortgages appear to offer important consumption smoothing benefits to the elderly, yet private markets for these products are small. A prominent idea is to combine LTCI and annuities to alleviate both supply (selection) and demand...

This paper explains why selection in the US reverse mortgage market to date has been advantageous rather than adverse. Reverse mortgages let quot;house rich, cash poorquot; older homeowners transfer wealth from the wealthy period after their home is sold to the impoverished period before. Near...

Economists have long puzzled over the apparent failure of older homeowners to cash out home equity. Casual observation, however, suggests that older homeowners under-maintain their homes. Estimated home equity reduction may thus be biased downward if self-reported home values do not incorporate...

Micro data over the life cycle show different patterns for consumption for housing and non-housing goods: The consumption profile of non-housing goods is hump-shaped, while the consumption profile for housing first increases monotonically and then flattens out. These patterns hold true at each...

Conventional wisdom assumes that homeownership is risky because house prices are volatile. But all households start life short housing services, and homeownership could be a less risky way of obtaining those services than the alternative, renting. While a renter faces year-toyear fluctuations in...

In this paper, we use a unique data set on granted mortgages to investigate whether immigrant and native borrowers are treated differently by lenders in the Spanish mortgage market. We observe that immigrant borrowers are charged substantially higher interest rates in their mortgages than their...

This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets...

Elderly home-owners get institutionalized less often than renters do. We hypothesize that housing tenure itself explains this behavior. Using longitudinal data from a Dutch community sample (N= 2,372) collected between 1992 and 2005, we find a negative effect of housing tenure on the probability...

This paper models the interdependence of parental inter vivos gifts and children’s home purchases when informal care affects decision making. We use data from Japanese households who purchased a detached house in an urban area to test this strategic interaction. Considering both censoring and...