Unemployment and Homeownership

Ronan Lyons updates his ongoing discussion of this issue on the following link

As Ronan states himself, these are round numbers being constructed from extrapolations from the Census and various property data sites. Ronan is moving toward estimates of the number of people who are both unemployed and in negative equity. I will make his life more difficult by noting that while this would be a really interesting statistic (particular its regional distribution), it does not take into account people who have retained some form of employment but whose income has fallen substantially.

7 replies on “Unemployment and Homeownership”

A recent NBER paper by Casey Mulligan points out some problems that emerge when people’s capacity to pay back loans is curtailed. “The housing turmoil has wealth effects and the price crash curtails residential construction while reducing investment goods prices and encouraging nonresidential investment (Mulligan and Threinen, 2008). But the settlement of the mortgage claims themselves may have further effects on the economy; investigating that settlement is the purpose of this paper.”

http://www.nber.org/papers/w14514

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Liam, thanks for the comment and the link – once we’ve got some idea of what falls are happening where (either through CSO earnings data or Amarach surveys or similar), I’m happy to see what we can say about the “under-earning” households also…

(… although current ECB rates are presumably offering them a substantial reprieve at the moment.)

All other comments welcome.

Ronan

Just a thought that might assist in making your estimations. If you look at the recent Age by Duration Series for April 09 from the CSO you’ll see that the largest absolute and percentage increases yoy in the numbers on the LR are in the 25 to 34 year age bracket: up from 55,987 in April 08 to 124,747 in April 09 (increase of 122.8% compared to a total increase of 95.6%). This group might be seen as likely to contain persons who have taken out a mortgage in the past 5 years. (There is also some evidence of increase in marriage rate from 2000 on compared to previous 10 years). If you exclude the increases among the young unemployed, the second largest increase was in the number on the LR aged 35 to 44 years – this group might have the highest number of persons who have taken out a mortgage over the past 5 to 10 years. More generally, rather than using the total number of persons on the Live Register and changes in this, it might aid accuracy to exclude the rapidly rising young unemployed (i.e., 55 years) as groups not like to have taken out a mortgage in the past 10 years.

Hi Tom,

Thanks for that – I’ve been peeking ahead already and there is some information in the DoEHLG database on the age profile of people taking out mortgages for the first time, so I’m hoping to be able to do some matching or at least educated insight based on what you describe and the DoEHLG figures.

R

Lost in transmission! The last sentence of my comment should have read: More generally, rather than using the total number of persons on the Live Register and changes in this, it might aid accuracy to exclude the rapidly rising young unemployed (i.e., 55 years) as groups not likely to have taken out a mortgage in the past 10 years.

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