All of Scioteca
Communities & Collections By Issue Date Authors Titles Subjects Country / Region
Profiles
Our Authors
My Account
Login

Moving “away" from Opportunities?: Homeownership and Employment

Homeownership is promoted by the majority of OECD member countries. Nevertheless, the impact that owning a house can have on employment levels is not fully understood. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of homeownership on employment using a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary threshold arising from a voucher-based homeownership program in Chile. We establish that homeownership decreases employment by between 3.85 and 5.33 percentage points. These results contrast with previous nonexperimental literature, which has often found a positive effect of homeownership on labor market outcomes. Our findings are primarily the result of individuals not entering the labor market, rather than workers being motivated to leave their job. We also find that families receiving a house through this program are neither more nor less likely to move to another labor market, contrary to what was proposed by previous theoretical papers. A likely mechanism driving the effect is that families moving into their own house under this program tend to see an increase in their monthly unearned income and in their housework obligations, which raises the minimum wage for which they are willing to work.

Abstract

Description

Subject

Investigación socioeconómica | Trabajo y protección social | Vivienda

País / Región

Chile

URI

https://scioteca.caf.com/handle/123456789/956

Date

2016-07-10

Cite from this publication

Collections

6.1 Documentos de trabajo en investigación socioeconómica

Endorsement

Review

Supplemented By

Referenced By

Creative Commons license

CC-BY-NC
Except where otherwised noted, this item's license is described as CC-BY-NC
Thumbnail Image

Files

Navarrete & Navarrete (2016).pdf (1.01 MB)

Authors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

CAF

Related Items

Thumbnail Image
Housing Subsidies, Labor Supply and Household Welfare. Experimental Evidence from Argentina

We study the impact of a social housing policy program implemented in Argentina, exploiting the random assignment rule to identify the policy's causal effect on...

Thumbnail Image
Starting on the right track? The effects of rst job experience on short and long term labor market outcomes

For young job seekers barriers to labor market entry are high, especially in developing countries were information frictions are large. Can first job experience impact...

Thumbnail Image
Labor Market Impacts of an Internship Program on People with Disabilities

This paper examines the impact of an internship program in Argentina (Programa Primer Paso; PPP) on the formal employment trajectories of people with disabilities (PwD)....

Thumbnail Image
Lasting Effects of Retaking College Admission Exams

Do second chances at a high-stakes admission exam yield long-term gains? Leveraging fifteen years of Chilean administrative data and an RDD, we examine the causal...

Thumbnail Image
Job training, selection and self discovery

We randomly assign 1250 unemployed men and women to be invited once or twice to a specific-skills training program offered by a large multinational firm...

Thumbnail Image
Determinants of Slum Formation: The Role of Local Politics and Policies

One-third of the developing world’s population lives in urban slums and the absolute number of slum residents grew from 650 million in 1990 to 863...