The Effect of Home-ownership on Labor Mobility in The Netherlands

In various macro-studies, home-ownership is found to hamper job mobility and to increase unemployment. This paper addresses similar issues, but uses a microeconometric framework where both individual job mobility, as well as the probability of being homeowner are modeled simultaneously. Using a panel of individual labor and housing market histories for the period 1989-1998, we estimate a nonparametric model of both job durations and home-ownership. We do not find homeowners to change less from jobs than tenants. Instead, our results suggest that the housing decision is driven by job commitment... Mehr ...