Home ownership start-up loans and school performance

Housing subsidies are intended to ensure suitable housing for those in need. The associated public policy initiatives are driven by the assumption that homeownership, as opposed to renting, can enhance living conditions, which, in turn, can have positive effects on children’s school performance. This paper analyses the impact of parents’ receiving home ownership start-up loans on their children’s school performance. We utilise high-quality individual administrative register data with a panel dimension to study whether being accepted for a home ownership start-up loan affects children’s national test result in reading and calculus. We apply a stacked difference-in-differences methodology to, first, study the impact of receiving funding on becoming a homeowner, home size and a move occurring within the municipality or not. Following this, we consider the impact of receiving a start-up loan on school performance. We employ entropy balancing weights to balance the treatment and control groups. Our findings suggest that the start-up loan had a significant and positive effect on becoming a homeowner and the size of the home, but we find no significant effects on the children’s school performance, except for a small positive effect on calculus performance for girls. Our results are mainly short term, and future research should also focus on long-term outcomes in the educational system.