Residential Satisfaction for a Continuum of Households: Evidence from European Countries

Abstract

Residential satisfaction depends on housing and neighborhood conditions in addition to housing cost affordability. To determine the relative importance of these factors, their average effect is usually estimated using sample data, eventually split in sub-samples in order to represent social classes. A concern about the division of households into groups is that, as groups are modified or group assignment change, results of quantitative analysis applied to such data can dramatically change. This paper follows a subjective well-being approach to study residential satisfaction. We propose a novel empirical strategy independent of the concept of social class, to estimate how the effect of drivers of residential satisfaction change on continuous according to households' income. We apply our methodology to investigate residential satisfaction in 23 European countries using 2012 EU-SILC module on housing conditions. Our results show that: (i) in Europe residential satisfaction is driven first by housing-specific characteristics, followed by neighborhood conditions and individual/household characteristics; (ii) the probability to be satisfied or very satisfied strongly differs across countries, anything else being equal; (iii) residents with different monetary resources attach importance to particular determinants of residential satisfaction.