Zusammenfassung:
We explore the shape of the elderly homeownership rate using a collection of microeconomic surveys of 17 OECD countries. In most, the survey is repeated over time. This allows us to construct an international dataset of repeated cross-sectional data, merging 59 national household surveys on about 300,000 individuals. We find that ownership rates decline considerably after age 60 in most countries. However, a large part of the decline should be attributed to cohort effects. After adjusting for such effects, we find that ownership rates fall after age 70 at a rate of about half a percentage point per year. Interestingly, ownership trajectories are quite similar across countries - with the exceptions of Finland and Canada - and unrelated to a wide set of indicators that we examine.