Housing Wealth
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)
- Chair: Vivek Sah, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
The Housing Channel of Intergenerational Wealth Persistence
Abstract
How important is the housing market for intergenerational wealth persistence? We answer this question empirically using Norwegian administrative panel data on income, wealth, and family relations and interpret our findings through a life-cycle model with housing. Controlling for a rich set of household and parental attributes, we document that households with above median wealthy parents are almost one percentage point (=21%) more likely to enter the housing market in a given year and buy homes worth$41,000 (=20%) more upon entry. Instrumenting parental wealth with either grandparent death or international stock market returns support a causal impact of parental wealth on housing market outcomes. Regarding mechanisms, we show evidence in support of cash transfers, parental home equity withdrawal, co-purchasing and intra-family house sales at discounted values. In sum, we find that 1/4 of the persistence in wealth across generations is due to housing. We use our model to quantify how our results depend on expected and realized house price growth, as well as mortgage regulation. Through the lens of the model, house price expectations stand out as a key determinant
of the strength of the housing channel of intergenerational wealth persistence.
Wealth Inequality and Housing Returns
Abstract
This study explores the relation between individual wealth ranking and the financial return on housing using detailed administrative data from Denmark combined with housing transactions. Individual wealth is positively related to unlevered housing returns: individuals in the 90th percentile of the wealth distribution earn a 8.4% higher return than individuals in the 10th percentile over a 10-year holding period. The entire gap in returns is eliminated when we control for location choice. Our results are important for understanding the determinants of wealth inequality, and suggest that we should focus on understanding differences in location choice between rich and poor households.The Spatial Distribution of the Homeownership Racial Gap
Abstract
The homeownership rate racial gap, defined as the disparity in homeownership rates between white and minority households, exhibits significant spatial variation even within urban areas. This study employs a semi-parametric approach based on sample re-weighting to jointly model location and tenure choices, and decompose the racial gap into two components: a portion that can be explained by differences in demographic characteristics such as education and income, and a portion that remains unexplained. Our findings indicate that while differences in demographic characteristics between racial groups account for some of the variation in homeownership rate differences across areas, the unexplained portion of the gap exhibits considerable spatial variation and is highly correlated with the racial composition of an area. Specifically, we find that areas with higher proportions of Black and Hispanic residents tend to have smaller homeownership rate racial gaps.Discussant(s)
Patrick Smith
,
University of North Carolina-Charlotte
Yi Wu
,
University of Reading
Velma Zahirovic-Herbert
,
University of Memphis
Andres Jauregui
,
California State University-Fresno
JEL Classifications
- R2 - Household Analysis