Does Owning Your Home Make You Happier? Impact Evidence from Latin America

Inder Ruprah ()

No 210, OVE Working Papers from Inter-American Development Bank, Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE)

Abstract: In this paper we present evidence that homeowners are happier than nonhomeowners and it is homeownership that causes the difference in happiness. The data used is for seventeen Latin American countries obtained from the LatinBarometer surveys. The association between homeownership and happiness is measured by an ordered logit regression with a comprehensive set of sociodemographic control variable with errors clustered at year and country. Happiness and ownership are positively and statistically significantly related. Causality is determined through nonparametric impact measure via the propensity score matching technique. Homeownership causes increased happiness. The impact result is robust to the problem of hidden bias. The impact conclusion also holds in a meta-impact approach where impacts are calculated for each country separately. Owning your home makes you happier, at least in Latin America.

Keywords: Home Ownership; Happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I00 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-lam and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://idbdocs.iadb.org/WSDocs/getdocument.aspx?docnum=35468992 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Owning Your Home Make You Happier?: Impact Evidence from Latin America (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:ovewps:0210

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OVE Working Papers from Inter-American Development Bank, Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().