Female-Headed Households and Homeownership in Latin America
- For policymakers
- Summary created: 2022
The paper shows that females have lower probability of home ownership than men, but not all females and this obscures the phenomenon when household level data is analysed.
Summary was created by
It is thought that this is the first paper which focuses on the factors affecting homeownership and household headship jointly by explicitly providing an econometric solution to the endogeneity issues that arise by the joint determination of both variables. The results for 17 Latin American countries show that the biases are important, and that female headed families have a substantially lower probability of attaining homeownership.
Insights
This paper claims that the determinants of women’s household headship and those of homeownership are correlated, and therefore the empirical models of the probability of attaining homeownership used in most studies has a statistical problem (endogeneity) that leads to inconsistent and often counter-intuitive results.
If female household headship is not exogenous to the tenure choice, then, even in the presence of lower probabilities of homeownership, a naive view of the data may reflect that women headed households have higher probabilities of owning their own home.
As expected, it was found that the higher the income of the family the higher the probability of owning their home.
The higher the income of the woman of the house the higher the probability of having a female headed family. Therefore, for a woman higher personal income has opposing effects on the probability of attaining homeownership.
On the one hand, the direct effect higher household income increases the probability of homeownership.
On the other hand, it also increases the probability of female headship and thus reduces the probability of homeownership.
What it means
Homeownership is one of the most powerful intergenerational wealth transmission mechanisms. Therefore, the results of this paper are important for poverty reduction policies. Although it does not provide immediate policy recommendations to eliminate or reduce homeownership gender biases, it changes the diagnostic and opens the window to explore at the country level the institutional determinants of this situation and the eventual remedies.
Proposed action
Although this paper does not provide immediate policy recommendations to eliminate or reduce homeownership gender biases, it opens the door for further exploration that should be made, at the country level, into the institutional determinants of this situation and the eventual remedies
Need high quality of data and important to know more about what happens within the household
Governments have social programs associated to housing tenure
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to iDE Global
These insights were made available thanks to the support of iDE Global, who are committed to the dissemination of knowledge for all.
Special thanks to Jasmyn Spanswick for preparation assistance
We would like to extend a special thank you to Jasmyn Spanswick, for their invaluable contribution in assisting the preparation of this research summary.
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