Abstract
This paper studies intergenerational links in home ownership, an increasingly important wealth marker and a measure of economic status in itself. Repeated cross sectional UK data show that home ownership rates have fallen rapidly over time, most markedly amongst younger people in more recent birth cohorts. Evidence from British birth cohorts data supplemented by the Wealth and Assets Survey show a significant rise through time in the intergenerational persistence of home ownership, as home ownership rates shrank disproportionately among those whose parents did not own their own home. Given the close connection between home ownership and wealth, these results on strengthening intergenerational persistence in home ownership are therefore also suggestive of a fall in intergenerational housing wealth mobility over time.
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Data availability
The raw datasets are available from the UK Data Service. The code to generate the analysis used here from publicly available data is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Partial finance support for this project was received through the NORFACE DIAL project Politics, Populism and Inequality. The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Paul Gregg, Lindsey Macmillan and conference participations in Mexico City, Jerusalem, Montreal, the Royal Economics Society Conference in Bristol and the NORFACE DIAL mid-term conference in Turku for a number of helpful comments and suggestions. This paper is a heavily revised, further developed version of Blanden and Machin (2017) Home Ownership and Social Mobility, Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No. 1466. We have benefited enormously from comments from the editors and two anonymous referees.
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Blanden, J., Eyles, A. & Machin, S. Intergenerational home ownership. J Econ Inequal 21, 251–275 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09563-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-023-09563-z