Determinants of Tenure Choice in Japan: What Makes You a Homeowner?
Aizawa, Toshiaki; Helble, Matthias | December 2016
Abstract
Despite Japan’s highly developed housing market, little is known about the determinants of renter-to-homeowner tenure transition. Exploiting the Japanese longitudinal household data of the Keio Household Panel Survey (2004–2013), this paper aims to close this gap. Our results show that income level and increase in family size are the strongest determinants for homeownership in Japan. We find that although both rural and urban households with higher incomes are more likely to transition to homeownership, access in rural areas is more equally distributed over various income groups. Since most of the previous empirical studies on tenure choice pay little attention to wealth as a measure of purchasing power, possibly due to data limitation, we draw attention to it and its relative levels. We find that household wealth levels matter, particularly in urban areas, whereas in rural areas homeownership is more equally distributed. Nonetheless, given the relatively low levels of household wealth among renters, our results suggest that income is a more important rminant of successful tenure transition.
Citation
Aizawa, Toshiaki; Helble, Matthias. 2016. Determinants of Tenure Choice in Japan: What Makes You a Homeowner?. © Asian Development Bank Institute. http://hdl.handle.net/11540/6798.Keywords
Cultural Development
Development Economics
Development Issues
Financial Sector Development
Infrastructure Development
Urban Development Finance
Financing
Financial System
Financial Sector Reform
Financial Institution
Bank Financing
Rural planning
Economic development
Economic indicators
Standard of living
Development projects
Development policy
Housing projects
Development models
Social reform
Urban planning
Public Borrowing
Credit Policy
Banks
Real estate development
Housing development
Community banks
Mortgage banks
Housing policy
Tax administration and procedure
Real property and taxation
Property tax
Credit control
Banks and banking
Title companies
Tax deductions
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