title: Home bitter home? Gender, living arrangements, and the exclusion from homeownership among older Europeans.
abstract: Homeownership is the most important asset among the elderly in Europe, but very little is known about gender and living arrangement differences in this domain. This paper aims at exploring patterns of exclusion from homeownership among middle-aged and older Europeans from a gender perspective, and with a special focus on their household composition. The analysis is based on the fourth wave of the "Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe" and includes a sub-sample of about 56,000 individuals aged 50 or over, living in 16 European countries. We estimated a set of multinomial logit models to examine the probability of being either tenant or rent-free occupiers versus homeowners. Our findings show that women are generally more likely to be excluded from homeownership than men. Nevertheless, a closer look suggests that the gender gap in homeownership is essentially generated by compositional differences between men and women, with the most relevant factor being household type. Older women are almost as twice as likely as men to live alone, which is associated-other things being equal-with a particular low likelihood to be homeowners virtually in every European country.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics, Informatics, Applications (DiSIA), University of Florence, viale Morgagni 59, 50134 Florence, Italy.
authors.forename: Daniele
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Vignoli
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Padova, Via C. Battisti 241, 35121 Padova, Italy.
authors.forename: Maria Letizia
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Tanturri
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology, The Pennsylvania State University, 211 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802 USA.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Acciai
keywords: Elderly; Europe; Gender; Homeownership; Living arrangements; SHARE