This paper explores the importance of unanticipated house price shocks for marital dissolution in the UK using individual household data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and county-level house price data from the Halifax House Price Index (HHPI). Results suggest that positive and negative house price shocks have asymmetric effects on the probability of partnership dissolution. Negative house price shocks significantly increase the risk of part- nership dissolution, while positive house price shocks do not have a significant effect in general. The destabilizing effect of negative house price shocks is par- ticularly pronounced for couples with dependent children, low family income, and high mortgage debt. Results are robust to a wide variety of specifications.
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Paper provided by Institute for Social and Economic Research in its series ISER working papers with number
2008-31.
Length: 24 Date of creation: 22 Sep 2008 Date of revision: Publication status: published Handle: RePEc:ese:iserwp:2008-31
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jonathan S. Skinner, 1996.
"Is Housing Wealth a Sideshow?,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Advances in the Economics of Aging, pages 241-272
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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