Do Long Distance Moves Discourage Homeownership? Evidence from England

Sejeong Ha and Christian Hilber

SERC Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the cost of collecting information on the destination housing market rises, the amount and quality of information collected fall, and the chances of making an ill-informed housing purchase decision increases, reducing the likelihood of such a purchase. Since owning relative to renting is associated with a much larger financial commitment and much higher transaction costs, the propensity to own can be expected to decrease with the distance moved. Using data from the Survey of English Housing from 1993 to 2008, we document that, consistent with our prior, an increase in the distance moved by one standard deviation decreases the probability that a household owns the next home by 3.2 percentage points.

Keywords: Residential mobility; distance of residential relocation; information cost; investment risk; homeownership; tenure choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 R21 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/sercdp0141.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do long-distance moves discourage homeownership? Evidence from England (2021)
Working Paper: Do long-distance moves discourage homeownership? Evidence from England (2021)
Working Paper: Do long distance moves discourage homeownership? evidence from England (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:sercdp:0141

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