Car Ownership? Evidence from the Copenhagen Metropolitan Area

The choice to focus on the location choices of households active on the labour and
housing market also implies, that we exclude households where both (or the one if single)
members are either student, unemployed, retired or otherwise inactive on the labour market
(23.8%). 4 There are two reasons for this choice. First of all, we want to examine how households
value and potentially trade-off urban amenities and labour market accessibility when choosing a
residential location. This is only relevant for households active in the labour market. Second,
households where both (or one if single) adults are unemployed will rarely be active on the
housing market – even if this was to improve the accessibility to jobs. However, when at least
one of the two persons in a retired couple is still active, they are included in our sample (59.2%).
We also include households in which one household member is employed and the other is
studying. In summary, we think that excluding households without a worker from the estimated
model allows us to focus on the most relevant group of household and does not imply substantial
biases.
We distinguish between single earner households (66,012) and dual earners households
(87,330) and estimate separate models for these two groups. The reason for this is that these
household types are quite different in many respects. In Denmark the norm for families is that
both adults in the household are active in the labour market. Families where one of the adults is
inactive on the labour market for a longer period of time by choice are uncommon.
In some areas we observe only single family housing types (mainly at the outskirts of the
study area) and in some areas only multi-family housing (apartments, in the centre of the GCA).
There are also areas in which we do not observe single family households with a car, or without
a car. Similarly not all areas have two-earner households without a car, with one car and with
two cars. In case we have no observations of a particular choice alternative we assumed it was
not in the choice set of the relevant household type. We also model car ownership, i.e. car
ownership for the single earner households and car 1-2 for the dual earners households. The total
choice set includes 538 and 636 elements for single earner households and dual earners
households, respectively.
4 The majority of these inactive households are pensioners (89.93%).
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