EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

On the user cost and homeownership

María José Luengo Prado
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Antonia Díaz and Maria Jose Luengo-Prado

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: This paper studies the determinants of housing tenure choice and the differences in the cost of housing services across households in an overlapping generations model with household-specific uninsurable earnings risk and housing prices that vary over time. We model houses as illiquid assets that provide collateral for loans. To analyze the impact of preferential housing taxation on the tenure choice, we consider a tax system that mimics that of the U.S. economy in a stylized way. We find that a mixture of idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty, house price risk, down payments and transaction costs are needed for the model to deliver life cycle patterns of homeownership and portfolio composition similar to those found in the data. Through simulations, we also show that a rental equivalence approach (relative to a user cost approach) overestimates the mean unit cost of housing by approximately 3 percent.

Date: 2006-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-fmk and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... cdd38a4cbb3f/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: On the User Cost and Homeownership (2008) Downloads
Working Paper: On The User Cost and Homeownership (2006) Downloads
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:cte:werepe:we065421

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().

 
Page updated 2024-11-11
Handle: RePEc:cte:werepe:we065421