Residential Mobility: Wealth, Demographic and Housing Market Effects

The study presents a very simple model in which housing equity can influence mobility, and then estimates parameters that gauge the impact of housing equity, local house prices and other variables associated with household structure and change on residential movement within the UK. The data come from the British Household Panel Study over 19922008, which allow us to use within-person variation to identify the parameters. The parameter estimates indicate that estimates based on cross-section variation are seriously biased in our analysis. We check the robustness of our results to errors in measuring equity using an instrumental variable estimator. Our main finding is that an increase in a household's housing equity encourages residential mobility substantially, and a decline discourages it.