Homeownership, housing capital gains and self-employment

John P. Harding and Stuart Rosenthal ()

Journal of Urban Economics, 2017, vol. 99, issue C, 120-135

Abstract: This paper measures the impact of individual-level housing capital gains on transitions into and out of self-employment. Drawing on special features of the 1985–2013 American Housing Survey (AHS) panel, our most robust models control for recent expenditures on home maintenance, MSA-by-year fixed effects, lagged proxies for wealth and other household attributes. Net of home maintenance, a 20% real increase in home value over a two-year period raises the likelihood of entry into self-employment by roughly 1.5 percentage points; housing capital losses have little effect on exits. Controlling for house fixed effects, self-employed homeowners are also more likely to hold a HELOC, facilitating easy, low-cost access to home equity that could be used to cover business expenses. These and other estimates suggest that links between homeownership and self-employment are strong enough to be important when home prices are rising rapidly, but modest when housing capital gains are limited or negative.

Keywords: Self-employment; Homeownership; Housing capital gains; Mortgage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J2 M2 R2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:juecon:v:99:y:2017:i:c:p:120-135

DOI: 10.1016/j.jue.2016.12.005

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