Housing affordability: Ireland in a cross-country context

Abstract

The mission of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) is to advance evidence-based policymaking that supports economic sustainability and social progress in Ireland. ESRI researchers apply the highest standards of academic excellence to challenges facing policymakers, focusing on 10 areas of critical importance to 21st Century Ireland.The Institute was founded in 1960 by a group of senior civil servants led by Dr T.K. Whitaker, who identified the need for independent and in-depth research analysis to provide a robust evidence base for policymaking in Ireland.Since then, the Institute has remained committed to independent research and its work is free of any expressed ideology or political position. The Institute publishes all research reaching the appropriate academic standard, irrespective of its findings or who funds the research.The quality of its research output is guaranteed by a rigorous peer review process. ESRI researchers are experts in their fields and are committed to producing work that meets the highest academic standards and practices.The work of the Institute is disseminated widely in books, journal articles and reports. ESRI publications are available to download, free of charge, from its website. Additionally, ESRI staff communicate research findings at regular conferences and seminars.The ESRI is a company limited by guarantee, answerable to its members and governed by a Council, comprising up to 14 members who represent a crosssection of ESRI members from academia, civil services, state agencies, businesses and civil society. The Institute receives an annual grant-in-aid from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to support the scientific and public interest elements of the Institute's activities; the grant accounted for an average of 30 per cent of the Institute's income over the lifetime of the last Research Strategy. The remaining funding comes from research programmes supported by government departments and agencies, public bodies and competitive research programmes.

Household size in Ireland: Stylised facts and cross country trends

“…At the other end of the age spectrum, households in Ireland headed by someone under the age of 30 see the highest household size, above those seen in the high group countries. These findings are consistent with Disch and Slaymaker (2023) who show that Ireland has the lowest share of single adult households amongst independently formed households under 40. Looking at the changes over the 2007-2018 period, falls in household size have generally been concentrated across middle-aged households in all of the country groupings.…”

“…However, the richness of the dataset in terms of the scope of the data across variables and the geographic coverage make it a useful source for housing research. For example, a number of studies such as Corrigan et al (2019), Disch and Slaymaker (2023) and Doolan et al (2022) have used the data for work on housing affordability. The data have also been used to explore other cross-country research topics such as mortgage arrears (Gerlach-Kristen and Lyons, 2018).…”

“…For the purposes of this research, we exclude central and eastern European countries for both data availability reasons and due to their lack of comparability in terms of housing systems relative to the Irish case. See Disch and Slaymaker (2023) for further discussion. In the remainder of Section 2, we present a series of descriptive statistics and stylised facts on Irish household size and other socio-demographic trends in a cross-country context.…”

Contrasting housing supply in Ireland, Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom

“…Bergin and McGuinness (2021) report that housing costs account for around 20 per cent of disposable income in both Northern Ireland and Ireland. Disch and Slaymaker (2023) examine this further and note that higher proportions of young people in Ireland live in the parental home, which would suggest that average costs are lower as they are split by a larger number of household members. However, given that the share of the population of people living in the parental home is small, it is concluded that housing costs as a proportion of income are similar across the two jurisdictions.…”

Housing, Health and Happiness: How Inadequate Housing Shapes Child and Parental Wellbeing

“…The data also do not contain information on rental or mortgage costs, meaning we cannot directly test the impacts of housing affordability on families, although they are likely to be higher among lower income households facing more socio-economic difficulties. Recent research has highlighted that unsupported tenants in the private rented sector face the highest housing cost burden as a percentage of income (Disch and Slaymaker, 2023;Roantree et al, 2022), which may account for the negative maternal outcomes for this sector.…”