Property ownership is the key explanatory factor for differences in income.

Franziska Kaiser, August 25 2021, “The impact of homeownership on wealth inequality,” Paper prepared for the 36th IARIW Virtual General Conference, https://iariw.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Kaiser_paper.pdf

My results are in line with the findings of former studies analyzing the effect of homeownership on wealth inequality across Europe. Mathä et al. (2014) stress that wealth inequality is strongly driven by changes in the housing market. Further, Kuhn et al. (2017) show that for the middle class, the most important wealth factor is housing wealth. According to Kaas et al. (2015), wealth inequality is lower in countries with less renters, as the average renter is poorer than the average owner, which is also presented in Table 4 to Table 6. Additionally, the measures of inequality reported in Table 1 indicate that wealth inequality is lower in countries with higher rates of homeownership. In contrast to the reference study, I find that the cross-country inequality is the largest around the median of equalized net household wealth and not below the median.