Wealth Inequality and Homeownership in Europe

Edgar Preugschat, Leo Kaas and Georgi Kocharkov

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: The nine largest countries in the Euro area have surprisingly different degrees of wealth inequality. At the same time, there is a strong negative correlation between wealth inequality and homeownership rates across countries. To account for this fact, we first analyze decompositions of the Gini coefficient across subgroups of households. The main contributing factor for the negative correlation with homeownership appears to be inequality between homeowners and renters. In a second step, we estimate the effects of homeownership on the Gini using a Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regression approach. The coefficients on homeownership are significantly negative and are positively correlated with between group Ginis (owners vs renters) across countries. To better understand the effect of ownership on inequality we regress ownership on individual quantiles. For most countries the effect of ownership is strongest for quantiles below the median. This suggests that policies promoting homeownership for lower wealth groups should have the largest impact wealth inequality.

JEL-codes: D31 E21 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-mac and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/113026/1/VfS_2015_pid_826.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Wealth Inequality and Homeownership in Europe (2019)
Working Paper: Wealth Inequality and Homeownership in Europe (2015)
Working Paper: Wealth Inequality and Homeownership in Europe (2015)
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:zbw:vfsc15:113026

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().