Homeownership, Renting and Market Failures: Evidence from Indian Slums

64 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2021

Date Written: July 30, 2020

Abstract

Housing rents are a major part of a slum household’s expenditure. I exploit a large scale ’big-push’ national urban renewal policy reform in India between 2005 and 2012 to empirically evaluate the multi-dimensional effect of rental reforms and housing provisions on home ownership, rental expenditures and quality of dwelling for slum households. One of the main benefits accruing to the affordable housing policy was to provide the entitlement of the land to the female head of the households as a measure of women empowerment.1 Combining a novel pooled cross-sectional household survey data for year 2002, 2008, 2012 and nighttime lights activity data at district level, I find the reform significantly increases the real rents by 18.2% and the probability to transition to homeownership by 16.7 percentage points. Females are 2.4 percentage points more likely to be the head of the household. The findings highlight the role of market failure.

Keywords: Slums, Developing Economies, Urban Economics, Housing, Government Policy

JEL Classification: J11, J68, R12, R28, R58, O18

Suggested Citation

Gupta, Neha, Homeownership, Renting and Market Failures: Evidence from Indian Slums (July 30, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3890188 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3890188

Neha Gupta (Contact Author)

University of St. Gallen ( email )

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FGN-HSG
St. Gallen, St. Gallen 9000
Switzerland
+41 71 224 21 74 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://https://fgn.unisg.ch/en/chairs/professor-cozzi/team

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