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This article assesses whether it is possible to reconceptualize the traditional research approaches to the relationship between poverty and the life cycle on the basis of different sociological perspectives on the life course found in the literature. While the family-cycle approach, which was originally formulated by Seebohm Rowntree (1902), is criticized for being static, descriptive, normative and inflexible, dynamic poverty research is mostly confined to the quantitative analysis of income trajectories, and thus offers only a partial solution to our problem. However, the life-course perspective allows us to combine the best elements of these traditional approaches and to reconceptualize them into a general framework for the study of social exclusion and poverty. To this end, three sociological perspectives on the life course are considered: the traditional North-American life-course perspective formulated by Elder (1974), the Continental institutional approach, and a combined approach which we label the 'political economy of the life course'. Drawing from these three perspectives, we propose a general framework of analysis and formulate hypotheses regarding the phenomena of social exclusion and poverty over the life course which can subsequently be empirically validated.

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We investigate the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of homeownership varies across European countries. Our main hypotheses are that the impact of parental homeownership on the likelihood and timing of an adult child’s entry into homeownership is less strong in contexts where homeownership is more accessible (in terms of affordability and access to mortgage credit), where renting is a feasible alternative to owning, and where the family matters less for the provision of welfare and housing. We perform discrete-time event history analyses of the transition to first-time homeownership using retrospective SHARELIFE-data from 10 European countries. Our respondents were born between 1908 and 1963, while observed entries to first-time homeownership occur between 1965 and 2009. We introduce fixed effects for countries and macro-level indicators for country-period combinations, interacted with parental homeownership. We find that the intergenerational transmission of homeownership is stronger in contexts where house prices are higher (and homeownership is less affordable), and less strong in more affluent contexts and in contexts where homeownership has increased more. The remaining differences in intergenerational transmission cannot be attributed to differences in welfare regimes or between dual and unitary rental markets.

Housing wealth is the largest source of household wealth, but we know little about the distribution of housing wealth and how institutions have shaped this distribution. Subsidies for homeownership, privatisation of social housing and mortgage finance liberalisation are likely to have influenced the distribution of housing wealth in recent decades. To examine their impact, we describe housing wealth inequalities across occupational classes for two birth cohorts aged fifty and older. The analysis is conducted across 16 European countries with divergent welfare states and housing systems using the fourth wave of the survey of health, ageing and retirement in Europe (SHARE; 2011/2012). Our results indicate that the expansion of homeownership in a market-based housing system is associated with a more unequal distribution of housing wealth across occupational classes, as an increasing number of ‘marginal’ owners are drawn into precarious homeownership. Such a pattern is not found in housing wealth accumulation regimes with a less market-based provision of housing. When the state or the family drive homeownership expansion, a de-coupling of labour market income and housing consumption results in a more equal distribution of housing wealth.

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