Income stagnation and housing affordability in the United States

IF 1.6 Q2 ECONOMICS

REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY Pub Date : 2020-04-23 DOI:10.1080/00346764.2020.1762914

Luke Petach

引用次数: 3

Abstract

Between 1980 and 2016 the share of households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution that owned their own home declined by 10 percentage points. For the same households, the share of monthly income spent on rent increased from 28% in 1960 to over 42% in 2016. To asses the extent to which income stagnation is responsible for the decline in affordability, I use Census microdata to construct counterfactual simulations that capture the evolution of housing market trends under alternative assumptions about the distribution of income. Income stagnation explains nearly the entire decline in affordability for the bottom quintile. Housing market frictions that cause the price of housing to deviate from marginal cost matter more to households further up the income distribution. Using Atkinson-type welfare-based inequality measures, I find that the counterfactual distribution of income – with inequality held constant – results in greater welfare for nearly all possible levels of inequality aversion.

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美国的收入停滞与住房负担能力

1980年至2016年间，收入分配最底层五分之一拥有自己住房的家庭比例下降了10个百分点。对于同样的家庭，用于租金的月收入份额从1960年的28%增加到2016年的42%以上。为了评估收入停滞在多大程度上导致了负担能力的下降，我使用人口普查微观数据构建了反事实模拟，捕捉了在关于收入分配的替代假设下住房市场趋势的演变。收入停滞几乎解释了底层五分之一人口负担能力下降的全部原因。住房市场摩擦导致房价偏离边际成本，对家庭收入分配进一步向上影响更大。使用阿特金森式的基于福利的不平等衡量标准，我发现收入的反事实分配——不平等保持不变——会导致几乎所有可能的不平等厌恶水平都有更大的福利。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

REVIEW OF SOCIAL ECONOMY ECONOMICS-

CiteScore

2.60

自引率

10.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： For over sixty-five years, the Review of Social Economy has published high-quality peer-reviewed work on the many relationships between social values and economics. The field of social economics discusses how the economy and social justice relate, and what this implies for economic theory and policy. Papers published range from conceptual work on aligning economic institutions and policies with given ethical principles, to theoretical representations of individual behaviour that allow for both self-interested and "pro-social" motives, and to original empirical work on persistent social issues such as poverty, inequality, and discrimination.