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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Home-ownership and housing wealth of elderly divorcees in ten European countries | | Author(s) | Barend Wind, Caroline Dewilde |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 38, no 2, February 2018 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, February 2018 |
| Pages | pp 267-295 |
| Source | https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X16000969 |
| Keywords | Owner occupied dwellings ; Life span ; Divorced persons ; Economic status [elderly] ; Poverty ; Wealth ; Cross national surveys ; Europe. |
| Annotation | Recent research has shown that divorce reduces the likelihood of home ownership. Even in later life, ever-divorced men and women display lower home ownership rates than their married counterparts. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the consequences of divorce for a majority of divorcees: those who remain in home ownership or move back into home ownership after an episode in rental housing. This paper investigates the economic costs of divorce. It focuses on the housing wealth of ever-divorced home-owners in later life (age 50 and over), against the background of changing welfare and housing regimes. The empirical analysis is based on data from ten European countries that participated in the third and fourth waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE 2007/8 and 2011/2). The countries were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The authors' analyses support an association between divorce experience and lower housing wealth holdings for men and women who remain in home-ownership after a divorce, or re-enter home ownership after a spell in rental housing. This means that a divorce has negative housing consequences for a broader range of individuals than thus far assumed. In countries with a dynamic housing market and a deregulated housing finance system, ever-divorced home-owners are worse off than their married counterparts. In these countries, more older individuals with a weaker financial situation are able to remain in or regain access to (mortgaged) home-ownership, but at the cost of lower housing equity. Further research should focus on the implications (e.g. for wellbeing, or economic position) of such cross-country variations. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-180209202 A |
| Classmark | KEA: BG6: SOJ: F:W: W6: W7: 3K: 74 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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