Income-Poor, Asset-Rich? The Role of Homeownership in Shaping the Welfare Position of the Elderly

Edyta Marcinkiewicz () and Filip Chybalski ()

No 38, LWS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: Our study contributes to the discussion about the extent of the phenomenon of the ‘income-poor, asset-rich’ elderly households, which can be associated with high homeownership rate in this group. However, we do not limit our analyses to this single category where low income is paired with high wealth, but rather explore the distribution of elderly households in terms of combinations of different levels of income and wealth. This way we shed some light on the existing patterns with reference to this distribution. This study focuses on the significance of homeownership and its impact on the welfare position of the elderly relative to the total population. We employ microdata from the Luxembourg Wealth Study Dataset (LWS) for 12 European countries. The results of the empirical research allow to draw some conclusions. First, ‘income-poor, asset-rich’ elderly households are a quite marginal category. Second, in the case of most countries studied, higher homeownership rates among elderly households, as compared to non-elderly households, are not accompanied by proportionally greater household wealth, even though the non-elderly are additionally burdened by the mortgage debt. However, we also find some evidence that homeownership is positively associated with the welfare position of the elderly.

Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in International Journal of Social Welfare, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsw.12623

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/lwswps/38.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:lis:lwswps:38

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LWS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Piotr Paradowski ().