Homeownership and Gender
20 Pages Posted: 13 Sep 2006
Date Written: August 2005
Abstract
The literature on the determinants of housing tenure often incorporates the gender of the household head as one exogenous explanatory variable. Several studies have found discrimination in favor of women and others fail to find significant results with respect to the household head gender. Given the outcomes, in other contexts, of the gender discrimination literature these results are surprising. In this paper, we argue that several determinants of household headship also affect homeownership and that failing to explicitly account for this endogeneity leads to inconsistent results. We estimate a recursive bivariate probit and find evidence of discrimination against women in the housing market. According to our estimates the traditional approach gives the wrong sign for the effect and overestimates the marginal effect of women headship by 10%.
Keywords: homeownership, gender, discrimination
JEL Classification: J7, R21
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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