We investigate the extent to which the intergenerational transmission of homeownership varies across European countries. Our main hypotheses are that the impact of parental homeownership on the likelihood and timing of an adult child’s entry into homeownership is less strong in contexts where homeownership is more accessible (in terms of affordability and access to mortgage credit), where renting is a feasible alternative to owning, and where the family matters less for the provision of welfare and housing. We perform discrete-time event history analyses of the transition to first-time homeownership using retrospective SHARELIFE-data from 10 European countries. Our respondents were born between 1908 and 1963, while observed entries to first-time homeownership occur between 1965 and 2009. We introduce fixed effects for countries and macro-level indicators for country-period combinations, interacted with parental homeownership. We find that the intergenerational transmission of homeownership is stronger in contexts where house prices are higher (and homeownership is less affordable), and less strong in more affluent contexts and in contexts where homeownership has increased more. The remaining differences in intergenerational transmission cannot be attributed to differences in welfare regimes or between dual and unitary rental markets.

Local policy makers seek ways to deal with abandoned industrial heritage in their jurisdictions. Many are demolished, but in some cases considerable investments are made to preserve the cultural aspects of industrial sites. The renewal plans are usually designed to stimulate urban renewal in the vicinity of these sites. Little seems to be known about the effectiveness of these policies. In this paper, we study whether the redevelopment of 36 industrial heritage sites in The Netherlands caused positive external effects by investigating the development of house prices in nearby residential areas. We use a difference-in-difference design by comparing quality-adjusted house prices in a predefined target and control area before the start, between the start and the completion and after the completion of the redevelopment. We also model the spatial and temporal dimensions of these external effects. We find that these dimensions matter substantially. We find that negative externalities on house prices before the start completely disappear after the start of the redevelopment of industrial heritage sites. We also find evidence for positive and local effects on house prices after the completion, but this result disappears when we remove the projects located in the largest cities.