Accounting for Homeowner Mobility in Net Housing Wealth Accumulation across Social Groups

The choice of principal residence is an important issue in differentiating net housing wealth (NHW) accumulation across social groups. We propose a new quantitative framework to decompose NHW accumulation as the sum of capital gains for stayers (homeowners who do not move), changes in debt, and two mobility gaps for movers. 

These two gaps result from differentiated access to homeownership (access gap) and transaction prices (price gap), which are estimated from micro-data of housing transactions informing the professional occupations (POs) of buyers and sellers. By adding census and mortgage data over two decades (1998–2017) for the French region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comte, we find an aggregate NHW accumulation of 47.2 billion current euros for all owned principal residences (175% of GDP growth). While capital gains accrue to stayers in proportion to their initial NHW, mobility generates much more unequal NHW accumulation. Mobility accounts for about one third of NHW accumulation and is regressive, as access and price gaps are more negative for low-status POs. We also find that about one half of the whole mobility gap is explained by observed housing characteristics (including location), while the other half is directly related to the POs of homeowners. These results are in contrast to what is usually found in wealth surveys and standard hedonic price imputations, with the additional specificity to be socially and spatially down-scalable.

Présenté par  Jean-Sauveur Ay, chercheur à UMR CESAER, INRAE, Institut Agro Dijon, Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.

Discutant : Gilles Laferté, chargé de recherche à l’INRAE.

Le séminaire est ouvert à toutes et tous et sera également diffusé en zoom : https://ined-fr.zoom.us/j/92122016293?pwd=42O1tgxerv9DApziaGw1huJ8xPKazU.1

ID de la réunion :921 2201 6293

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