Young Homeownership

Objective

Consider a household looking to buy a house. In attractive locations, this household competes with other buyers to purchase their desired property since the number of listed properties is limited. In this scenario, what is the impact of subsidizing a given group? What is the impact of a change in public policy that affects one group more than others? Do households respond to the policy by changing their preferences?

YoHo (Young Homeownership) builds on a simple yet powerful insight: if a buyer is competing against other buyers from the same group, then changing financial conditions for that group will not change their access to the housing market but may affect how much they can pay. The insight that YoHo proposes to formalize is that if a policy targets a large share of buyers, subsidizing them will likely not lead to higher homeownership rates but to rising prices. Moving beyond market-level outcomes, YoHo will further dig deeper into the potential side effects for young buyers, such as limited access to attractive locations. YoHo will combine Norwegian register data, natural experiments, and theoretical modeling in line with the state-of-the-art housing literature to answer questions of large importance for society, the economic situation for households, and future research into affordability and homeownership. Access to the housing market is an ongoing societal challenge in many countries that involves the general public, policymakers, and academics. The work in YoHo is at the core of this challenge, with the potential to make a meaningful contribution to the debate. The research will be conducted under Professor Florian Heider's guidance at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, which aims to produce original, high-quality research and research-based policy advice in all finance areas, and a regular and permanent exchange with members of governments, parliaments, central banks, and supervisory authorities in Germany and Europe.