Homeownership, as a way to build up housing wealth, is believed to play an increasingly important role in terms of providing welfare to citizens. However, homeownership does not always act as a nest-egg; it can be a source of financial anxiety as well. In this paper we investigate how homeownership and housing wealth impact on the relationship between divorce and subjective wellbeing (life satisfaction, happiness, financial satisfaction).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe private rented sector (PRS) recently enjoyed a revival, in particular in the years before and after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). At the same time however, affordability concerns have come to the fore. The main aim of this paper is to explain trends in housing affordability for lower-income households in the PRS across Western European countries, from a supply versus demand perspective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Hous Built Environ
November 2016
Housing wealth is the largest source of household wealth, but we know little about the distribution of housing wealth and how institutions have shaped this distribution. Subsidies for homeownership, privatisation of social housing and mortgage finance liberalisation are likely to have influenced the distribution of housing wealth in recent decades. To examine their impact, we describe housing wealth inequalities across occupational classes for two birth cohorts aged fifty and older.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntegrating housing tenure in Instrumental Motivation Theory predicts a tenure gap in electoral participation, as homeowners would be more motivated to vote compared with tenants. The empirical question is whether this effect is causal or rather due to selection into different housing tenures. This question is tackled using coarsened exact matching (CEM) on data for 19 countries, allowing us to better control for endogeneity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigate the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of homeownership varies across European countries. Our main hypotheses are that the impact of parental homeownership on the likelihood and timing of an adult child's entry into homeownership is less strong in contexts where homeownership is more accessible (in terms of affordability and access to mortgage credit), where renting is a feasible alternative to owning, and where the family matters less for the provision of welfare and housing. We perform discrete-time event history analyses of the transition to first-time homeownership using retrospective SHARELIFE-data from 10 European countries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article assesses whether it is possible to reconceptualize the traditional research approaches to the relationship between poverty and the life cycle on the basis of different sociological perspectives on the life course found in the literature. While the family-cycle approach, which was originally formulated by Seebohm Rowntree (1902), is criticized for being static, descriptive, normative and inflexible, dynamic poverty research is mostly confined to the quantitative analysis of income trajectories, and thus offers only a partial solution to our problem. However, the life-course perspective allows us to combine the best elements of these traditional approaches and to reconceptualize them into a general framework for the study of social exclusion and poverty.
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