Much attention has been devoted to examining the absolute benefits
of home-ownership (e.g. security and autonomy). This paper by contrast is
concerned with conceptualising and testing the relative benefits of homeownership;
those benefits that depend on an individual’s status in society.
Home-ownership has previously been analysed as a social norm, implying that
the relative benefits (costs) associated with being an owner (renter) are
positively related to relevant others’ home-ownership values. The theoretical
contribution of this paper is to additionally conceptualise home-ownership as a
positional good, implying that the status of both home-owners and renters is
negatively related to relevant others’ home-ownership consumption.
The empirical contribution of this paper is to quantitatively test for these relative
benefits in terms of subjective well-being. We run fixed effects regressions on
three waves of the British Household Panel Study. We find that i) a strengthening
of relevant others’ home-ownership values is associated with increases
(decreases) in the subjective well-being of home-owners (renters), and ii) an
increase in relevant others’ home-ownership consumption decreases the life
satisfaction of owners but has no effect for renters.
Overall our findings suggest that i) the relative benefit of home-ownership are
both statistically significant and of a meaningful magnitude, and ii) homeownership
is likely to be both a social norm and a positional good. Without
explicitly recognising these relative benefits, policymakers risk overestimating
the contribution of home-ownership to societal well-being