Interrelationships between the transition to home ownership and family processes in Australia: evidence from the HILDA panel survey

Spallek, M. and Haynes, M. Interrelationships between the transition to home ownership and family processes in Australia: evidence from the HILDA panel survey.

Abstract

Many Australians aspire to home ownership to ensure that housing costs will be low following retirement from the work force. The rate of home-ownership in Australia is approximately 70% of all households. However, housing tenure is not static for an individual or family but changes with key life events as they occur. The transition to home-ownership is a decision frequently made within the context of family formation or family planning but the timing of this transition has changed with recent research showing that home-ownership rates have declined amongst younger Australians, and also that home-ownership is increasingly occurring before the birth of a first child. Social changes related to family processes including delayed union formation and fertility decisions, have contributed to the observed decline in home ownership amongst young Australians. However, longitudinal data has shown that there are several types of housing tenure pathways in which the order of transition to home-ownership and birth is reversed. Further research is required to determine the individual and family circumstances that lead to a delay in home-ownership and how this is interrelated with the timing of a first birth.

In this research we investigate the interrelationships between these two significant processes in a family’s life course. We analyse data from ten waves of the Australian HILDA panel survey to simultaneously model these two processes to determine the factors associated with home-ownership before or after the birth of a child and the duration from the beginning of a relationship to the occurrence of a birth or a transition to home ownership. Our approach is to estimate a multiprocess event-history model, allowing the unobserved heterogeneity associated with the two processes to be correlated, assuming that the timing of the transitions into home ownership and birth processes are partially explained by underlying common unobserved factors.