Divorce law reforms and house prices in Europe
Rafael González-Val and
Miriam Marcén
Additional contact information
Miriam Marcén: Universidad de Zaragoza
European Journal of Law and Economics, 2024, vol. 58, issue 3, No 5, 517-549
Abstract:
Abstract This study investigates the static and dynamic effects of legal reforms facilitating divorce on housing prices. Multiple mechanisms, such as variations in housing demand and supply, can be influenced by these law reforms. On the one hand, divorced individuals often require separate dwellings, thus increasing housing demand. On the other hand, an increase in supply is often precipitated by the divorcées needing to sell their married home. Detailed information was collected regarding the historical changes in divorce laws across ten European countries from 1960 to 2008. This data was combined with information from the annual Real House Price Index developed by Knoll et al. (Am Econ Rev 107:331–353, 2017). The study regards the divorce law reforms as providing a quasi-experimental setting. This is primarily because the entry timings of these reforms differ across countries and their target is not regulation of the housing market, but rather to simplify the dissolution of marriages. The study finds that divorce law reforms accounted for a substantial 22% of the average interannual increment in the Real House Price Index, particularly 3–6 years post reforms. Such a short-term, yet significant, impact was found to be consistent even after performing identification checks and including time-variant and invariant controls.
Keywords: Divorce laws; Real house prices; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 J12 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10657-024-09822-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
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:kap:ejlwec:v:58:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s10657-024-09822-y
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10657
DOI: 10.1007/s10657-024-09822-y
Access Statistics for this article
European Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Jürgen Georg Backhaus, Giovanni B. Ramello and Alain Marciano
More articles in European Journal of Law and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().