Are the children of homeowners increasingly advantaged? Trends in relative and absolute mobility of homeownership in Europe

Homeownership is declining among younger generations across Europe. A common assumption is that this decline has been increasingly stratified by parental homeownership, due to rising house prices and the growing importance of parental financial support. We show that this assumption does not hold for the average European (and for most countries). Using data from EU-SILC 2011 and 2019 covering 24 European countries, we examine trends in relative and absolute mobility of homeownership for birth cohorts 1951 to 1984. On average, relative mobility remained largely stable across cohorts, while absolute mobility increased. The apparent stability of relative mobility masks a deeper structural cohort shift: downward mobility increased from 14 per cent to 38 per cent, while upward mobility declined from 23 per cent to 8 per cent between cohorts born in the early 1950s and early 1980s. Therefore, homeownership has declined significantly for both children of homeowners and renters. We also compare absolute and relative mobility trends across countries and show that they often diverge for two reasons. First, a mechanical effect of the origin distribution: in countries with widespread parental homeownership, relative mobility largely reflects changes in upward mobility. Second, the source of mobility: using two novel counterfactual simulations, we show that observed absolute mobility changes mainly stem from structural shifts in homeownership chances, rather than strengthening parent-child associations.