Explaining Variation in Intergenerational Downward Mobility in Homeownership across Europe

Bettina Hünteler , DIW Berlin
Selçuk Bedük, University of Oxford
Byambasuren Dorjnyambuu, TÁRKI, Social Research Institute, Budapest
Philipp Lersch, DIW Berlin

Against the background of declining homeownership rates among younger adults in Europe, recent research suggests that the share of individuals who do not own their home despite their parents’ homeownership has increased substantially. Thus, parental homeownership no longer guarantees children’s homeownership. Yet, as the level and increase of downward mobility vary across European countries, it remains unclear under which circumstances individuals experience downward mobility and who is particularly prone to it. Integrating the life course framework with cost-benefit approaches, we expect to find lower probabilities of downward mobility in contexts with fewer structural barriers and stronger family norms, and with higher socio-economic status of the respondents and their family of origin. Moreover, individual and family characteristics should matter less in contexts with fewer barriers and higher homeownership rates. We use two waves of the European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and integrate demographic, economic, and housing-related contextual indicators from the novel DECIPHE contextual data base for 83,317 individuals from 25 European countries to test these expectations. After describing country differences in downward mobility, we apply Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to examine how cross-national differences in socio-economic composition explain this variation. Lastly, we employ multilevel mixed-effects models with cross-level interactions to explore the explanatory power of individual- and family-related characteristics across contexts. This study contributes to the literature on social inequality and mobility by investigating the drivers and contextual dependencies of the declining intergenerational transmission of advantage, focusing on homeownership as a key dimension of wealth inequality.

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 Presented in Session P2. Families, Fertility, and the Life Course 2