Elderly vs Working-Age Generation: Homeownership and Housing Asset Inequality in a Cross-Country Perspective

Edyta Marcinkiewicz ()

No 41, LWS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: This study contributes to the discussion about wealth inequality, albeit from a more detailed housing perspective. It explores tenure inequality, as well as housing assets inequality. The latter includes a different approach than the one that prevails in the previous literature on wealth inequalities, which most often considers total net worth or net housing wealth. This study focuses on gross housing asset distribution, irrespective of mortgage debt, which corresponds with the potential of housing equity accumulation as a source of income in old age. It emphasises the intergenerational context, but simultaneously involves cross-country comparisons that allow for relative assessment of the intergenerational differences. Drawing from the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) database the paper presents the results for fourteen developed countries. They suggest that the current working-age generation is to a lesser extent involved into homeownership, as compared to the older generation, which results in a smaller housing equity per household, but simultaneously it experiences greater housing inequality. Furthermore, as shown in a cross-country perspective, homeownership rates and housing asset inequality are negatively correlated. Consequently, higher housing asset inequality by lower homeownership rates are the factors that undermine the usefulness of the asset-based welfare concepts in a policy application. Such findings imply that in the macro perspective the potential of housing as a source of additional income in cash and in kind tends to shrink.

JEL-codes: D63 G51 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2023-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Social Indicators Research, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03207-5

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/lwswps/41.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:41

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 ().