The recently published Household Finance and Consumption Survey has revealed large differences in wealth inequality between the countries of the Euro area. We find a strong negative correlation between wealth inequality and homeownership rates across countries. We use two decomposition methods to shed more light on this correlation. First, a Gini decomposition by homeownership status shows that the negative relationship is mostly driven by large between-group inequality across owners and renters. Second, to control for other observables, we conduct a detailed counterfactual decomposition of crosscountry inequality differences. We confirm the major role for homeownership rates in accounting for the wealth inequality differences. Our analysis suggests that the crosscountry variation is mostly driven by differences in the savings behavior of households in the bottom half of the wealth distribution and that those differences in savings are to a large extent channeled through housing wealth. D31, E21, G11.

The homeownership rate in Germany is one of the lowest among advanced economies. To better understand this fact, we evaluate the role of specific housing policies that tend to discourage homeownership. In comparison to other countries with higher homeownership such as the United States, Germany has an extensive social housing sector with broad eligibility criteria, high transfer taxes when buying real estate, and no tax deductions for mortgage interest payments by owner-occupiers. We build a life-cycle model with uninsurable income and housing risks and endogenous homeownership in order to quantify the policy impact on homeownership and welfare. Adjusting all three policies has a strong impact on housing tenure choices, closing the gap in homeownership rates between Germany and the United States by about two thirds. At the same time, household welfare would be reduced by moving to a policy regime with low transfer taxes, but it would improve in the absence of social housing, in particular, when coupled with housing subsidies for low-income households.

The homeownership rate in Germany is one of the lowest among advanced economies. To better understand this fact, we analyze the role of three specific policies which discourage homeownership in Germany: an extensive social housing sector with broad eligibility criteria, high transfer taxes when buying real estate, and no tax deductions for mortgage interest payments by owner-occupiers. We build a lifecycle model with uninsurable income risk and endogenous homeownership in order to quantify the policy effects on homeownership and welfare. We find that all three policies have sizable effects on the homeownership rate. At the same time, household welfare would be reduced by moving to a policy regime with low transfer taxes and mortgage interest tax deductions, but it would improve in the absence of social housing, in particular when coupled with housing subsidies for low-income households.

We experimentally investigate buyer and seller behavior in small markets with two kinds of frictions. First, a subset of buyers may have (severely) limited information about prices, and choose a seller at random. Second, sellers may not be able to serve all potential customers. Such capacity constraints can lead to coordination frictions where some sellers and buyers may not be able to trade. Theory predicts very different equilibrium outcomes when we vary the setup along these two dimensions. In particular, it implies that a higher number of informed buyers will lead to lower prices when sellers do not face capacity constraints, while prices may actually increase if sellers are capacity constrained, as shown by Lester (2011). In the experiment, the differences between the constrained and non-constrained case are confirmed; prices fall when sellers are not capacity constrained but either do not fall by much or even increase when they are not. We find that prices are quite close to the predicted equilibrium values except in treatments where unconstrained sellers face a large fraction of informed buyers. However, introducing noise into the theoretical decision making process produces a pattern of deviations that fits well with the observed ones.

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