Homeownership, mobility, and unemployment: Evidence from housing privatization

0538688 - SOÚ 2021 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Broulíková, H. - Huber, P. - Montag, J. - Sunega, Petr
Homeownership, mobility, and unemployment: Evidence from housing privatization.
Journal of Housing Economics. Roč. 50, December (2020), s. 1-18, č. článku 101728. ISSN 1051-1377. E-ISSN 1096-0791
Institutional support: RVO:68378025
Keywords : Homeownership * Housing privatization * Mobility * Unemployment
OECD category: Applied Economics, Econometrics
Impact factor: 1.705, year: 2020
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137720300644?via%3Dihub

Homeownership is believed to cause higher unemployment. This is because homeowners face higher mobility costs that limit their job search to local labor markets. Empirical tests of this prediction have yielded mixed results so far, possibly due to the endogeneity of homeownership. This paper proposes that the privatization of public housing in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain was a substantial policy shock that generated largely exogenous assignment of homeownership to individual households. This facilitates a new test of the effects of homeownership on mobility and unemployment: First, our empirical results do not reject that homeownership reduces mobility. Second, our results are inconsistent with homeownership increasing unemployment.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0316437