The intergenerational homeownership gap across Europe: an empirical exploration of explanations

Research consistently shows that European Millennials (born in the 1980s) have lower homeownership rates than Generation X (born in the 1970s) by their mid-30s. At the same time these groups differ in various sociodemographic characteristics. The relative importance of these differences in contributing to intergenerational homeownership gaps is not yet fully understood. We apply regression modelling and a decomposition analysis of the gaps for a large number of European countries based on EU-SILC 2004–2020. We show that differences in marital status and household composition (specifically, a lower share of households with children and married individuals among Millennials) are the main predictors of the intergenerational gap in most countries. This underlines the central role of family formation processes for homeownership. Moreover, marital status and household type are even more relevant in Southern European countries than in most other European countries. Beyond that, several approaches to housing regimes are limited in their ability to explain the country rankings we find for intergenerational homeownership gaps and for patterns of relative importance of sociodemographic differences between generations.