| Many young households rent their primary residence despite the lower user-cost of owning. Owning, however, requires the household make a down payment and is an illiquid and risky investment. While young households typically have low wealth, they also have different family and career concerns than older households and may not expect to stay in any residence long. In a dynamic OLG model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets, we assess the contribution of financial constraint, family changes, and career concerns to the home ownership pattern. We prove existence of a steady state with stochastic prices where the household's problem has a finite-dimensional state object. We find that 7 percent of young households are constrained from owning, while 20 percent choose not to due to career concerns. The presence of family size changes leads to higher ownership for the very youngest households while middle-aged households are less likely to own. |
