IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/eab/microe/22558.html

Lifetime Income and Housing Affordability in Singapore

Author

Listed:
  • Tilak Abeysinghe

    (SCAPE)

  • Jiaying Gu

Abstract

The existing measures of housing affordability are essentially short-run indicators that compare current income with property prices. Taking into consideration that a housing purchase is a long-horizon decision and the property price reflects the discounted present value of future mortgage payments, we develop a housing affordability index as the ratio of lifetime income to housing price. Lifetime income is computed by obtaining the predicted income from a regression over the working life from age 20 to 64 for each birth cohort for which limited data were available. Lifetime income of Singapore households by three income quantiles (lower, median, and upper quartiles) shed new light on the increasing income inequality. The affordability index reveals informative trends and cycles in housing affordability both in the public and private sectors. We argue why residential property price escalations need to be avoided by showing that such price increases do not necessarily create a net wealth effect for the aggregate of households.

Suggested Citation

  • Tilak Abeysinghe & Jiaying Gu, 2008. "Lifetime Income and Housing Affordability in Singapore," Microeconomics Working Papers 22558, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:eab:microe:22558
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.eaber.org/node/22558
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Li, Hong & Yang, Hongxing, 2010. "Study on performance of solar assisted air source heat pump systems for hot water production in Hong Kong," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 87(9), pages 2818-2825, September.
    2. Zhengyu Cai & John V. Winters, 2024. "Income and Fertility of Female College Graduates in the United States," Journal of Labor Research, Springer, vol. 45(4), pages 479-498, December.
    3. Tilak Abeysinghe, 2019. "Old-age dependency: is it really increasing in aging populations?," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 26(13), pages 1111-1117, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand
    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eab:microe:22558. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Shiro Armstrong (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eaberau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.