Becoming a homeowner in Britain in the 1990s

John Ermisch and Brendan Halpin

No 2000-21, ISER Working Paper Series from Institute for Social and Economic Research

Abstract: We model the hazard of first entry to owner occupation, using a sub-sample of the British Household Panel Study consisting of young adults not yet in owner occupation. Our interest is to assess the importance of social inequality, measured as socio-economic class using the new ONS-SEC, while taking account of the direct effects of age, household formation, education and labour market situation of the individual (and his/her spouse, where appropriate). Socio-economic class has a very strong bivariate effect but this persists, with some modification, into the multivariate analysis. Higher professionals and managers have by far the highest rate of entry, with the unemployed and students having the lowest, even when controlling for income, education, employment status, age, gender and household formation, all of which have strong effects of their own. On a smaller sample we investigate some effects of class of origin, and of spouse's class but with few significant effects. Some features of this modelling lead us to speculate that access to social housing, as a competing destination, may be patterning entry to owner occupation. The class gradient may reflect as much the compensatory effects of state provision as market-related advantages. Also, the effect of childen on entry to owner occupation is strongly negative. We investigate this by fitting parallel models on the rate of entry to social housing, and find that this seems to be the case: while the age and partnership effects are very similar, the class effect is reversed (except for students, whose low rate of entry to ownership is not associated with disadvantage) and the effect of children is strong and positive.

Date: 2000-05-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/fi ... ers/iser/2000-21.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:ese:iserwp:2000-21

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Publications Office, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ UK
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/publications/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISER Working Paper Series from Institute for Social and Economic Research Publications Office, Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jonathan Nears ().