Household Mobility Research Articles

People on the Move: Exploring the Functional Roles of Deprived Neighbourhoods

Given the neighbourhood focus of much regeneration policy, we need to know more about the functional roles that neighbourhoods play in the way that households move within the housing market and hence about the different functional types of neighbourhood amongst deprived areas. Such knowledge would help both to guide the priorities of policy and to interpret the probability of policy interventions being successful. This exploratory study draws on an evaluation of the British government's National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, part of which entails an interpretation of household mobility data from the 2001 Census. It suggests four categories of neighbourhood—transit, escalator, isolate, and improver areas—based on the relationship between where households move to and move from, focused on the 20% most deprived lower super output areas in England. Evidence on the ground suggests the plausibility of the different functional roles played by the four neighbourhood types. Some continuing conundrums—the robustness of the categorisation, the need to take account of the spatial context of deprived areas, and the difference between movers and stayers—are discussed as a prelude to further continuing research.

Mobility, Residential Location and the American Dream: The Intrametropolitan Geography of Minority Homeownership

This article applies data from Washington, DC, Chicago and Los Angeles to estimate three‐level nested multinomial logit models of household mobility, residential location and homeownership tenure choice. Model simulation indicates that shocks to income can significantly elevate the homeownership attainment of minority households; however, their urban settlement and homeownership patterns remain substantially more concentrated than those of whites. Simulated equilibration of black economic status with that of whites results in an approximate doubling of homeownership rates among black movers to central city areas. In contrast, homeownership rates among black movers to suburban and outlying areas lag far behind those of whites.

Comment on “Inequality in Japan”

Comment on “Inequality in Japan”

Who Gets What and Why? Vacancy Chains in Stockholm's Housing Market

Abstract The importance of physical resources in influencing life chances makes the study of resource allocation processes and rules especially pertinent and this leads naturally to the question: who gets what and why? This article focuses on the significance of housing construction for residential mobility and addresses the vital question: who will gain from new construction? It examines whether it is possible to build directly for well-resourced households and hope that it indirectly also supports lower income households. It also examines the possibility that changes in the way in which the housing market operates with market-driven construction, geared at a post-modern housing lifestyle, have changed the situation for less well resourced households, compared to traditional housing construction. The study is based on a unique longitudinal database that covers the total population in Sweden over the period 2000–2002. The data are analysed using a Markov chain model that provides a way of analysing the relationship between vacancies in the housing market and household mobility. Tentative answers to questions on the length of the vacancy chains that are created when different types of dwellings become vacant in Stockholm city and what type of households are involved and not involved, are given. These answers have important implications for urban planning.

Housing Busts and Household Mobility

Using two decades of American Housing Survey data from 1985-2005, we estimate the impact on household mobility of owners having negative equity in their homes and of rising mortgage interest rates. We find that both lead to lower, not higher, mobility rates over time. The impacts are economically large, with mobility being almost 50 percent lower for owners with negative equity in their homes. This does not imply that current worries about defaults and owners having to move from their homes are entirely misplaced. It does indicate that, in the past, the lock-in effects of these two factors were dominant over time. Our results cannot simply be extrapolated to the future, but policy makers should begin to consider the consequences of lock-in and reduced household mobility because they are quite different from those associated with default and higher mobility.

Household income mobility in China and its decomposition

Using the data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), we measured the income mobility of households in China from 1989 to 2000. The results are decomposed into three sources: exchange , growth , and dispersion . These results show that the household income mobility in China remained at a high level from 1989 to 2000, which is due to an exchange process accompanied by high growth . Tracing the history of macroeconomic policy in China, we found that the mode of income mobility is closely associated with these policies when the time lag is taken into account.

The Impact of Socio-economic Status and Mobility on Perceived Family Functioning

Perceptions of current family functioning in relation to current household income level, educational status, social-class at birth and social mobility over the lifecourse were investigated in a group of 483 individuals at age 50. Subjective report of family functioning was assessed using the McMaster Family Assessment Device (FAD) with socio-economic information obtained from a self-report Health and Lifestyle Questionnaire. Results indicated significant relationships between household income, social mobility and FAD scores for men but not for women in this sample. For men, lower current income and downward social mobility over the lifecourse were associated with a more negative perception of family functioning. Further research is required to understand the gender differences observed and delineate cause versus effect mechanisms.

Population Mobility, Tenure Choice and Institutional Factors

The Hong Kong government is involved deeply in the housing market. It provides public rental blocks as well as subsidised housing for sale. Government intervention has created various institutional factors in the form of relocation restrictions and subsidies. Little research has been done in the past to address how mobility is affected by institutional factors, in terms of the unique tenure structure in Hong Kong. This research aims to bridge this gap. It is found that government policy has a significant effect on the mobility of households, in particular the public rental sector. Further, the patterns of tenure choice are significantly different for households of public and private sectors. There are signs that the government is intending to minimise its role in the housing system. The suspension of the HOS programme together with the cancellation of loan subsidies could further restrain the mobility of public sector households. Institutionally induced spatial lock-in among public sector households will be aggravated in the near future. It is recommended that the loan scheme should be reinstated to provide an alternative and incentive for the households in the public sector to relocate and return their flats to the Housing Authority. This can help relieve the financial pressure in the face of a budget deficit because loan subsidies are more cost effective than subsidies in kind.

Resale Externality and the Used Housing Market

The selling prices of used houses may not fully reflect the maintenance spending of current owners when prospective buyers are unable to conduct a thorough inspection before purchase. This article investigates how this resale externality problem affects the maintenance expenditures of homeowners. After considering both observable and unobservable repair expenses, the analysis shows that the resale externality reduces not only maintenance expenditures, but also household mobility. A treatment effects model is used to estimate the simultaneous relationship between mobility and maintenance in the Japanese resale housing market. The results indicate that the resale externality has a significant negative impact on maintenance expenditures.

Etienne van de Walle, ed. African Households: Censuses and Surveys. Amonk, N.Y., and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. xxxix + 247 pp. Figures. Maps. Tables. References. Index. $104.95. Cloth.

Etienne van de Walle, ed. African Households: Censuses and Surveys. Amonk, N.Y, and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. xxxix + 247 pp. Figures. Maps. Tables. References. Index. $104.95. Cloth. Peter Laslett first showed us the sociological information available in historical census data. African census and survey data are rarely employed to such ends, so the African Census Analysis Project, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania and African institutions, arranged an Internet conference on African households in November 2001. These are the published results. Here the is merely a unit of enumeration. It generally contains members of at least one family, plus, often, unrelated others. Censuses take one of two definitions of the household. Francophone researchers tend to adopt a de jure, or social, definition of the household, thus including those who are absent on the enumeration day, while Anglophone researchers prefer a de facto, or residential, definition, and count only those physically present. The former runs the risk of double counts, while die latter tends to manufacture extra households and female heads. All of this is explained in van de Walle's masterful introduction. He notes that African censuses are weak when it comes to coding for intrahousehold relationships. In consequence, grandchildren, children's spouses, and domestic employees are often lumped together under the impenetrable category of other relative. The most useful censuses are those that link husbands and wives, and mothers to their children. Three of the chapters here examine the merits of various censuses and surveys. Van de Walle and Gaye's comparison of the Senegalese and Gambian censuses finds that Senegal's de jure census, just by including questions on marriage type and the rank of polygynous wives, is far more informative than the Gambia's more elaborate de facto census. Next, Labov shows the limitations of Tanzania's minimalist de facto census, which, however, does reveal that Tanzania's solitary females are usually separated, divorced, or widowed, and that the urban ones are more likely to be household heads than their rural counterparts. Then Hosegood and Timaeus's work on KwaZulu, Natal, shows how their time-consuming de jure survey accurately captures the emic realities of household composition, the high levels of individual and household mobility, the number of nonresidential members, and memberships in multiple households. Vimard and Fassassi's chapter on the 1975-98 structural changes in Cote d'lvoire's households is the only one with a central focus upon economics. They show that the recent increase in family breakups has less to do with a drift toward nuclear families than with households' relative prosperity. Single-parent households and coresident relatives are now permanent social fixtures. Four of the chapters focus upon children. Townsend, Madhavan, Collinson, and Garenne's work in South Africa's Northern Province successfully traces personal relationships within and across household boundaries by training enumerators to use the six basic anthropological kinship terms. …

Household mobility and cellular telephone demand

Cellular telephones are mobile, and this mobility is one of the key factors influencing the demand for cellular service. This article examines the household demand for cellular telephone and finds that the numbers of vehicles and drivers in the household strongly influence the demand for cellular telephones. Income has the strongest effect. We find some evidence that telephone landlines and cellular telephone service are substitutes. The results are based on data from the 2001 National Household Travel Survey conducted the US Department of Transportation.

Household Mobility in Rural Scotland: The Impact of the Poor Law after 1845

Household Mobility in Rural Scotland: The Impact of the Poor Law after 1845

Price dynamics in public and private housing markets in Singapore

In down-payment constrained housing consumption models, increases in house prices could trigger household mobility decisions in housing markets. This study empirically tests house price dynamics associated with the mobility of households in the public resale and private housing markets in Singapore. The results show that stochastic permanent breaks were found in the public housing resale prices and private housing prices. The relative prices drift apart occasionally, but mean-revert to a long-run fundamental equilibrium. Error correction mechanisms and lagged public housing prices were also found to have significant explanatory effects for price changes in the private housing markets. The results support the hypothesis that household mobility creates co-movements of prices in public and private housing submarkets in the long run.

Economic inequality in Spain: the european community household panel dataset

This article uses data from the 1998 European Community Household Panel to study economic inequality in Spain. It reports data on the Spanish distributions of income, labor income, and capital income, and on related features of inequality, such as age, employment status, educational attainment, and marital status. It also reports data on the income mobility of Spanish households, and data on income inequality in other European countries and in the US. We find that income, earnings, and, especially, capital income are very unequally distributed in Spain and that economic inequality in Spain is well above the European average.

Household Mobility Tool Ownership: Modeling Interactions between Cars and Season Tickets

This paper moves beyond traditional models of car ownership in that we propose a framework for modeling household-level decisions to acquire specific types and numbers of mobility tools to fulfill the mobility needs of household members. The framework is applied to a data set collected during the winter and spring of 2000/2001 in the German city Karlsruhe via an interactive web-based stated response survey in which respondents could optimize their household mobility tool sets through on-line feedback concerning the estimated costs of the sets. In our analysis, bivariate ordered probit models are estimated for three combinations of mobility tools: season tickets (i.e., transit passes) and cars, season tickets and small cars and season tickets and large cars. In all instances, strong substitution effects are found – that is, as the number of season tickets increases, the number of cars decreases. This finding underscores the need to move beyond simple models of car ownership to comprehensive models of mobility tool ownership. As demonstrated by our research, failure to do so is likely to lead to biased results.

Poverty, Residential Mobility, and Student Transiency within a Rural New York School District*

Abstract Human capital models assume residential mobility is both voluntary and opportunity-driven. Residential mobility of low income households, however, often does not fit these assumptions. Often characterized by short-distance, high frequency movement, poverty-related mobility may only deepen the social and economic instability that precipitated the movement in the first place. Children may be particularly affected because of disrupted social and academic environments. Among community institutions, schools often experience significant student turnover as a consequence. This paper presents a case study of student transiency and residential instability within an impoverished rural New York school district, examining both enrollment change data and residential histories collected from economically disadvantaged parents of mobile students. It finds that poverty-related mobility is frequently not voluntary but the consequence of precipitating social and economic crises at the household level in combination with the inability to obtain adequate and affordable housing. Hence, poverty-related hypermobility may be interpreted as both a consequence and determinant of rural community disadvantage.

A comparison of household mobility for owned manufactured, traditional owned, and rental units using the American Housing Survey

This study employs data from the national sample of the American Housing Survey to analyze the mobility decisions of families in owned manufactured housing in comparison to families in traditional owned homes and rental units. Specifically a continuous time probability model (CTM) is used to estimate the likelihood of these families moving over the period of 1993–2001. In general, the empirical work suggests that families occupying both owned manufactured housing and traditional owned housing are associated with lower probabilities of moving than comparable households in rental units. Of particular interest is the fact that, ceteris paribus, families in both traditional owned homes and owned manufactured housing exhibit negative duration dependence, or a decreasing probability of moving over time, while for those in rental units duration dependence is positive. These differences are important because of their potential implications for long-term neighborhood stability and, as such, the viability of manufactured housing as an affordable housing alternative for lower income families.

New Evidence on the Effect of Fiscal Decentralization on the Size and Composition of Government Spending

While competition among companies tends to be beneficial for the general public, this is not necessarily the case for competition among governments. Key in the fiscal competition theory is that the mobility of firms and households yields incentives for governments to aim to improve their relative position through successive undercutting of tax rates and welfare state arrangements. This mechanism has the potential to work as a disciplining device because it ensures that no jurisdiction is allowed to be grossly inefficient, because if it were grossly inefficient, mobile factors of production would move away. The main concern in the theoretical fiscal competition literature, however, has been that fiscal competition lowers government spending below their efficient levels. Another concern related to fiscal competition is that household mobility is likely to undermine attempts by governments to redistribute income. Empirical evaluation of both the existence and consequences of fiscal competition is the central topic of the thesis “An Empirical Analysis of Decentralization, Fiscal Competition and Welfare Policy”. A particular focus of this thesis is on fiscal competition in welfare policy. With decentralized responsibility for the welfare benefit system in Norway, theory predicts that local governments will behave strategically in setting their welfare policy in order to avoid becoming ‘welfare magnets’. The key finding in Chapter 2 of this thesis is that Norwegian local governments in fact engage in such a ‘welfare game’. A local government will respond with reducing their welfare benefits when neighboring local governments reduce their welfare benefits. Encouraged by the finding in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 seeks to answer the question: Does Welfare Policy Affect Residential Choices? The analysis shows that Norwegian welfare recipients respond to changes in welfare policy by migrating. Local politicians concern about being to generous compared to their peers seem warranted. The analysis in Chapter 4 evaluates whether strategic interaction among Norwegian local governments in property tax decisions occurs. With limited mobility of the tax base and politically highly visible decisions, we interpret the strategic interaction found to be driven by yardstick competition, rather than competition for a mobile tax base. The final chapter differs from the rest in that it utilizes data from 18 OECD countries. The essay analyzes the effects of decentralization of government on the size and composition of government spending. Since jurisdictions with limited geographic scope (such as local governments) are, in general, more likely to face greater competitive pressures than larger ones (such as countries), it follows that the more fiscally decentralized countries are expected to experience stronger fiscal competition. One of the key findings is that decentralization of taxing powers is associated with less transfer spending, but unrelated to government consumption.

Residential Mobility and Housing Adjustment of Older Households in Europe

This paper investigates the determinants of residential mobility of older households (above 50 years old) and the adjustment of housing for those who move employing individual data from the European Community Household Panel. Although homeowners are less likely to move compared to renters, an increase in mobility rates is observed for older age homeowners. Moreover, having an outstanding home loan, retirement, the death of a spouse, and excessive housing costs, are significantly associated with a move in central and northern European countries, but not in the south. Analyzing the transitions from the current tenure choice after a move takes place, based on a competing risk hazard model, an increasing transition out of the current residence for old-age homeowners is found, indicating some dissaving later in life. The direction of the transitions is mostly from ownership to renting. However, especially in countries in central and northern Europe, transitions from ownership to ownership are also observed, which are associated with a reduction in the home size.

The complexity of daily occupations in multiple sclerosis

The aims of this study were to describe which self-care, productivity, and leisure occupations individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) perceive as difficult to perform on admission to rehabilitation and the individuals’ own perception of the importance of, performance of, and satisfaction with these occupations. Whether the reported self-care, productivity, and leisure occupations were related to sex, age, disease severity, and living arrangements was also investigated. Forty-seven men and women (mean age 49.4 years) were assessed with the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM) on admission to rehabilitation. The individuals reported 366 occupations (median 8, range 3–15), which were categorized as self-care (51%), productivity (30%), and leisure (19%). Three COPM subcategories—household management (26%), personal care (21%), and functional mobility (20%)—accounted for two-thirds of the reported occupations. All prioritized occupations (n=238; (median 5, range 2–7) had high ratings for importance and the ratings for performance and satisfaction were generally low. Men reported significantly more occupations related to self-care than women, but no significant difference between the sexes could be found for productivity and leisure. No significant differences between the occupational areas were found when age, disease severity, or/and living arrangements were included in the analysis. In conclusion, individuals with MS perceive difficulties with occupations related to all aspects of daily life. This underscores the need to use assessment tools that capture the complexity of daily occupations.