Abstract
This article uses survey data to estimate non-cash income from imputed rents, using a consistent methodology for all countries to assemble comparable statistics that allow for a valid inter-country comparison. We can confirm a significant impact of non-cash income and find an inequality-decreasing effect for the unconditional income distribution which highly correlates with the proportion of owner-occupiers in the respective countries. However, aggregated inequality measures are not suited to analyze the increase in the conditional income inequality between owner-occupiers and renters, who do not obtain income from imputed rents by definition. Therefore, we apply a reweighting decomposition that controls for the heterogeneous housing characteristics among European countries and allows us to decompose the distributional changes into a part that is explained by the proportion of tenure types and household size and a remaining part that reflects the relative dispersion of imputed rents along the income distribution.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 504-532 |
Journal | Review of Income and Wealth |
Volume | 69 |
Issue number | 2 |
Early online date | 1 Jul 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 The Author. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.
Keywords
- housing markets
- imputed rents
- income inequality