Labor income uncertainty, skewness and homeownership: A panel data study for Germany and Spain

Do Long Distance Moves Discourage Homeownership? Evidence from England

“…To begin with, Haurin and Gill (1987), Haurin (1991) and Robst et al (1999) demonstrate, using US data, that income uncertainty adversely affects homeownership attainment. Diaz-Serrano (2005) reports a similar finding in a European context, where institutional settings and property market characteristics are quite different from the US. In a related study, Davidoff (2006) shows that individuals whose labor incomes co-vary strongly with housing values purchase relative inexpensive homes or rent.…”

Unemployment risk, house price risk and the transition into home ownership in the United Kingdom

“…Using household panel data for Spain and Germany, Diaz-Serrano (2005b) shows that although the variance of income has a negative effect on home ownership, skewness in the income distribution has a positive effect on home ownership in both institutional settings. This can be explained by the risk-aversion of households which induces a preference for positively-skewed income distributions and reduces the likely loss from income uncertainty (in the case of homeownership the likelihood of mortgage default).…”

“…The existing empirical evidence is unanimous in finding a negative relationship between income uncertainty and the propensity to be a home owner in cross-sectional studies using US data (Haurin and Gill, 1987;Haurin, 1991;Robst et al, 1999) and also Spanish and German data (Diaz-Serrano, 2005a) and Italian data (Diaz-Serrano, 2005b). In these studies uncertainty is typically incorporated as a measure of the volatility of income, such as the coefficient of variation in household labour income over previous years (e.g.…”

Should we rely on the Kenward–Roger approximation when using linear mixed models if the groups have different distributions?

“…A further point to note in this regard is that in psychological and social research one commonly encounters variables that present skewed distributions. Examples include: reaction times or response latency in cognitive studies (Shang-Wen & Ming-Hua, 2010;Ulrich & Miller, 1993;Van der Linden, 2006); clinical assessment indexes in drug abuse research (Deluchi & Bostrom, 2004); physical and verbal violence in couples (Soler, Vinayak, & Quadagno, 2000;Szinovacz & Egley, 1995); divorced parents' satisfaction with co-parenting relationships in family studies (McKenry, Clark, & Stone, 1999); and labour income (Diaz-Serrano, 2005) and health care costs (Zhou, Lin, & Johnson, 2009) in sociological studies.…”