Analysis of the dynamics of housing tenure choice in Britain

The study uses data from the 1958 birth cohort, collected in the British National Child Development Study, to model the dynamics of people's first entry to either owner-occupation or tenancy in social housing, the two major tenures in Britain. The effects of lifetime earnings prospects, family background, a person's own spells of unemployment, the regional unemployment rate, and regional relative house prices on the timing and pattern of first entry are estimated in the context of a competing risk hazard model. It also shows that, given the observed matrix of subsequent tenure transitions, these impacts on the timing and destination of first major tenure also have important effects on the number of years which a person spends in each tenure over his/her life. (C) 1997 Academic Press.