Female Headed Households and Homeownership in Latin America

Abstract

The gender of the household head has often been treated as an exogenous determinant of housing tenure. The paper argues that several determinants of homeownership also affect household headship and that failing to explicitly account for this endogeneity leads to inconsistent results. Using individual level data for Chile, Honduras and Nicaragua, it is shown that although on average women have a lower probability of being homeowners, those women that head their families (single, separated or divorced) have higher probabilities of attaining homeownership. Thus household level analysis should control for the endogeneity of household headship in order to properly address the gender effect on housing tenure. The paper estimates a recursive bivariate probit model and finds evidence that, all else equal, female headed families have a lower probability of owning their home in 13 out of 17 Latin American countries. Without the endogeneity control this result was not present in 12 countries.