IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/idb/brikps/2899.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Owning Your Home Make You Happier?: Impact Evidence from Latin America

Author

Listed:
  • Ruprah, Inder J.

Abstract

In this working paper, the authors present evidence that homeowners are happier than non-homeowners and it is homeownership that causes the difference in happiness. The data used is from seventeen Latin American countries obtained from the LatinBarometer surveys. The association between homeownership and happiness is measured by an ordered logit regression with a comprehensive set of socio-demographic control variable with errors clustered at year and country. Happiness and ownership are positively and statistically significantly related. Causality is determined through nonparametric impact measure via the propensity score matching technique. Homeownership causes increased happiness. The impact result is robust to the problem of hidden bias. The impact conclusion also holds in a meta-impact approach where impacts are calculated for each country separately. Owning your home makes you happier, at least in Latin America.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruprah, Inder J., 2010. "Does Owning Your Home Make You Happier?: Impact Evidence from Latin America," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 2899, Inter-American Development Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:idb:brikps:2899
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Does-Owning-Your-Home-Make-You-Happier-Impact-Evidence-from-Latin-America.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Richard K. Crump & V. Joseph Hotz & Guido W. Imbens & Oscar A. Mitnik, 2009. "Dealing with limited overlap in estimation of average treatment effects," Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, vol. 96(1), pages 187-199.
    2. Dietz, Robert D. & Haurin, Donald R., 2003. "The social and private micro-level consequences of homeownership," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 401-450, November.
    3. Bruno S. Frey & Alois Stutzer, 2002. "What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 40(2), pages 402-435, June.
    4. Marco Caliendo & Sabine Kopeinig, 2008. "Some Practical Guidance For The Implementation Of Propensity Score Matching," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(1), pages 31-72, February.
    5. van Praag, B. M. S. & Frijters, P. & Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A., 2003. "The anatomy of subjective well-being," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 29-49, May.
    6. Guido W. Imbens, 2004. "Nonparametric Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Under Exogeneity: A Review," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(1), pages 4-29, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Latin American home owners are happier, unlike US ones
      by Economic Logician in Economic Logic on 2011-03-02 21:44:00

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tim Tiefenbach & Florian Kohlbacher, 2015. "Happiness in Japan in Times of Upheaval: Empirical Evidence from the National Survey on Lifestyle Preferences," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 16(2), pages 333-366, April.
    2. Sebastian Will & Timon Renz, 2021. "In Debt but Still Happy? Examining the Relationship between Homeownership and Life Satisfaction," ERES eres2021_89, European Real Estate Society (ERES).
    3. Cheng, Zhiming & King, Stephen P. & Smyth, Russell & Wang, Haining, 2016. "Housing property rights and subjective wellbeing in urban China," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 45(S), pages 160-174.
    4. Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), 2012. "Room for Development: Housing Markets in Latin America and the Caribbean: Summary," IDB Publications (Books), Inter-American Development Bank, number 79942, February.
    5. Reto Odermatt & Alois Stutzer, 2022. "Does the Dream of Home Ownership Rest Upon Biased Beliefs? A Test Based on Predicted and Realized Life Satisfaction," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 23(8), pages 3731-3763, December.
    6. Ehsan Latif, 2021. "Homeownership and happiness: evidence from Canad," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 41(1), pages 1-17.
    7. Rachel Ong ViforJ & Hiroaki Suenaga & Ryan Brierty, 2024. "Homeownership and subjective well-being: Are the links heterogeneous across location, age and income?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 61(5), pages 859-877, April.
    8. Inter American Development Bank, 2012. "Room for Development: Housing Markets in Latin America and the Caribbean: Summary," IDB Publications (Books), Inter-American Development Bank, number 447, November.
    9. Ehsan Latif, 2016. "Happiness and Comparison Income: Evidence from Canada," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 128(1), pages 161-177, August.
    10. Honghao Ren & Henk Folmer & Arno J. Van der Vlist, 2018. "The Impact of Home Ownership on Life Satisfaction in Urban China: A Propensity Score Matching Analysis," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 19(2), pages 397-422, February.
    11. Álvaro José Altamirano Montoya & Karla Maria Damiano Teixeira, 2017. "Multidimensional Poverty in Nicaragua: Are Female-Headed Households Better Off?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 132(3), pages 1037-1063, July.
    12. Ruut Veenhoven & Felicia Chiperi & Xin Kang & Martijn Burger, 2021. "Happiness and Consumption: A Research Synthesis Using an Online Finding Archive* â€," SAGE Open, , vol. 11(1), pages 21582440209, March.
    13. Apergis, Nicholas & Hayat, Tasawar & Kadasah, Nasser A., 2019. "Subjective well-being in housing purchasing: Evidence with survey data from the U.K. housing residential market," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 328-335.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dettmann, E. & Becker, C. & Schmeißer, C., 2011. "Distance functions for matching in small samples," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 55(5), pages 1942-1960, May.
    2. Esaka, Taro, 2013. "Evaluating the effect of de facto pegs on currency crises," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 943-963.
    3. Zotti, Roberto & Speziale, Nino & Barra, Cristian, 2014. "On the causal effect of religion on life satisfaction using a propensity score matching technique," MPRA Paper 60066, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Marchesano, Katia & Musella, Marco, 2020. "Does volunteer work affect life satisfaction of participants with chronic functional limitations? An empirical investigation," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    5. Caliendo, Marco & Künn, Steffen & Schmidl, Ricarda, 2011. "Fighting Youth Unemployment: The Effects of Active Labor Market Policies," IZA Discussion Papers 6222, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    6. Esaka, Taro, 2014. "Are consistent pegs really more prone to currency crises?," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 136-163.
    7. Caliendo, Marco & Künn, Steffen, 2011. "Start-up subsidies for the unemployed: Long-term evidence and effect heterogeneity," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(3), pages 311-331.
    8. Schilling, Brian J. & Attavanich, Witsanu & Jin, Yanhong, 2014. "Does Agritourism Enhance Farm Profitability?," Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Western Agricultural Economics Association, vol. 39(1), pages 1-28, April.
    9. Gary King & Christopher Lucas & Richard A. Nielsen, 2017. "The Balance‐Sample Size Frontier in Matching Methods for Causal Inference," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 61(2), pages 473-489, April.
    10. Beard, T. Randolph & Ford, George S. & Saba, Richard P. & Seals, Richard A., 2012. "Internet use and job search," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 260-273.
    11. Dridi, Ichrak & Boughrara, Adel, 2023. "Flexible inflation targeting and stock market volatility: Evidence from emerging market economies," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    12. Feng Hu, 2013. "Homeownership and Subjective Wellbeing in Urban China: Does Owning a House Make You Happier?," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 110(3), pages 951-971, February.
    13. Dolton, Peter & Smith, Jeffrey A., 2011. "The Impact of the UK New Deal for Lone Parents on Benefit Receipt," IZA Discussion Papers 5491, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    14. Martin Binder & Alex Coad, 2014. "How satisfied are the self-employed? A life domain view," SPRU Working Paper Series 2014-17, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    15. Kitagawa, Toru & Muris, Chris, 2016. "Model averaging in semiparametric estimation of treatment effects," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 193(1), pages 271-289.
    16. Takahashi, Ryo, 2021. "How to stimulate environmentally friendly consumption: Evidence from a nationwide social experiment in Japan to promote eco-friendly coffee," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 186(C).
    17. Marco Caliendo & Stefan Tübbicke, 2020. "New evidence on long-term effects of start-up subsidies: matching estimates and their robustness," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 59(4), pages 1605-1631, October.
    18. Victor Chernozhukov & Iván Fernández‐Val & Blaise Melly, 2013. "Inference on Counterfactual Distributions," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(6), pages 2205-2268, November.
    19. Bodory, Hugo & Huber, Martin, 2018. "The causalweight package for causal inference in R," FSES Working Papers 493, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland.
    20. Caloffi, Annalisa & Freo, Marzia & Ghinoi, Stefano & Mariani, Marco & Rossi, Federica, 2022. "Assessing the effects of a deliberate policy mix: The case of technology and innovation advisory services and innovation vouchers," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(6).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    WP-02/10;

    JEL classification:

    • R30 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - General
    • I00 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:idb:brikps:2899. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Felipe Herrera Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iadbbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.