Housing Decisions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Marcel Fischer
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283780816

Owner-occupied homes differ from conventional assets, such as stocks or bonds, along many dimensions. Whereas recent work including Grossmann and Laroque (1990), Cocco (2005), Yao and Zhang (2005), Marekwica, Schaefer and Sebastian (2013), Fischer and Stamos (2013), and Campbell and Cocco (2015) has contributed to our understanding of several of these dimensions, the life-cycle literature has largely ignored the impact of family composition and changes in it for the demand for owner-occupied homes.My goal is to contribute to a better understanding of this relationship along two dimensions. First, I want to investigate how family composition and changes in it drive the demand for owner-occupied homes in a theoretical life-cycle model. Such an investigation should be particularly valuable for studying long-term consequences, where a life-cycle model allows controlling for other factors. Second, I want to use a unique Danish data set containing information about all home trades in Denmark with detailed information about home properties for the last decades as well as detailed information about households involved in these trades. I want to use this data set to contribute to a better understanding of the factors driving the decision to trade owner-occupied homes and whether these factors differ in booming and busting housing markets.My goal is to publish both the results of the life-cycle model and those of the empirical approach in leading international finance or econ journals.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants