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212 Volume LXIII nn. 3-4 – Luglio-Dicembre 2009 might be reluctant to sell their own home and make profit by their redundant housing capacity (e.g. when children leave the nest). Many authors underline the paradox of the “cash poor/house rich” elderly (Lefebure et al. 2006, Castles 1998). SHARE data confirm previous research findings that ownership rates decline considerably with age in most countries. However, a large part of the decline is found to be attributed to cohort effects (Chiuri, Jappelli, 2006; Börsch-Supan et al. 2005). Interestingly, ownership patterns across age are quite similar across countries, with the partial exception of Mediterranean Countries where ownership acquisition is stable since long term (Kohly et al. 2005, Castles, Ferrera 1996). From a comparative perspective, variations in national housing tenure patterns can be explained by many factors: historical influences, cultural variations (e.g. in inter-generational transfers of wealth), economic cycle, housing and financial markets, and institutional arrangements (Lefebure et al. 2006). Variety in home tenure structure impinge on poverty differences between countries and groups (Börsch-Supan et al. 2005, Lefebure et al. 2006). An owner occupier is in significantly better position than a renter with the same income and studies on economic well-being should take into account this issue (Börsch-Supan et al. 2005). Conversely, those who are poor are definitively worse off if they have also to pay a rent. This paper is aimed at verifying if older poor Europeans are “house rich”, or rather if monetary poverty prevents them to live in their own home, so that social policies should take them into account. Using a logistic regression model, we delineate the profile of old people who do not have access to home ownership, keeping into account a plurality of covariates related to personal background, to familial characteristics, and opportune combination of them. In particular we are interested to identify the fragile profiles – with regard to poverty status, living arrangement and gender – having a higher risk of being excluded by home ownership. 2. Data and descriptive findings We take our data from the database “Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe” (SHARE 2.0.1: Börsch-Supan et al., 2005). SHARE is a multidisciplinary and cross-national database of freely accessible micro data on health, socioeconomic status and social and family networks of individuals aged 50 or over. The analysis is carried out on a sub-sample of about 28.000 individuals, aged 50 or over, living in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. SHARE data show that the rate of home ownership among the older European varies substantially across countries: rates range from more than 50% of Germany, Austria and Sweden to more than 80% in Spain and
Rivista Italiana di Economia Demografia e Statistica 213 Greece. Women are particularly disadvantaged in Denmark, France, Sweden and Germany (gender differences of more than 10 percentage points). As already stated above, in this work we want to shed light on the connection between home tenure and poverty status among older Europeans. With this purpose we will stick to the narrower notion of relative monetary poverty (lack of disposable income), for reasons of simplicity. However, relative monetary poverty is strictly correlated with other spheres of deprivation. In SHARE only gross income (expressed in Euros) is collected. We converted gross into net income (see Vignoli, De Santis, 2009, for details on the procedure). We then obtained the net equivalent income by applying a standard equivalence scale: the square root of the number of household members. In particular we consider poor those individuals whose net equivalent income lies below the poverty threshold, 60% of the equivalent median net income for each country as calculated from SHARE. In Figure 1, we compare the prevalence of home ownership among all older households and, first, among all poor older household and second among a particularly vulnerable group: poor older women living alone. It is evident that poor households have a lower access to property anywhere, but differences are small where home ownership is widespread, larger elsewhere. In any country households composed by poor old women living alone have lower ownership rates than the poor households altogether. Surprisingly poor women living alone in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are in a more severe condition with respect to the average of the older poor households. 3. Do the poor have less access to home ownership? Table 1 presents the parameter of a logistic regression predicting the exclusion from home ownership, according to a set of demographic and socio-economic covariates (eventually survived as significant in a stepwise estimation procedure). The country-specific differences observed in our descriptive Figure 1 are here confirmed, also once we control for structural characteristics of the sample. Other things being equal, the exclusion from property is much more common in Austria, Sweden and Germany than in the Mediterranean cluster. If we do not find a clear trend by age, not surprisingly the less educated are more likely to be excluded by home ownership. Unemployed people, as well as those permanently sick and disabled, seem more likely to be excluded from home ownership, suggesting that some of the most disadvantaged segments of the population have also lower access to property. Conversely, and expectedly, being childless increases the odd ratio of owning the home where one live. This is possibly due to the fact that during the life-course old people might have left the property to their descendants (inter vivos transfers) or also that parents have less
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