Search Results

Title: Is Student Loan Debt Discouraging Home Buying Among Young Adults?
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Houle, Jason N.
Berger, Lawrence Marc
Is Student Loan Debt Discouraging Home Buying Among Young Adults?
Presented: San Francisco CA, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2014
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): College Cost; Debt/Borrowing; Home Ownership; Racial Differences; Student Loans / Student Aid

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Scholars, policy makers, and journalists have long speculated that the rise of student loan debt may lead to a range of negative outcomes among the recent generations of young adults. Most recently, many have suggested that student loan debt is holding back the housing market recovery, and that high debt burdens are leading young adults to leave the housing market, en masse. But despite these strong claims, there is very little empirical evidence on this topic. In this study, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 cohort and ask how student loan debt accumulation is associated with home ownership outcomes (1) owning a home; 2) having a mortgage; 3) amount of mortgage debt among homeowners) in the current generation of young adults. In addition, given large racial and socioeconomic disparities in home ownership and student loan debt, we also examine whether the association between student loan debt and homeownership outcomes differs across racial and socioeconomic groups. We use a variety of methodological techniques; including OLS and 2-stage least squares instrumental variables, and find limited evidence that student loan debt is reducing home ownership among young adults. Although we find a significant association between debt and home-ownership, the association is substantively modest in size, suggesting that student loan debt is not a drag on the housing market. However, we find important race differences in the association between debt and homeownership, such that the effect of student loan debt on ownership outcomes is stronger for blacks than whites.
Bibliography Citation
Houle, Jason N. and Lawrence Marc Berger. "Is Student Loan Debt Discouraging Home Buying Among Young Adults?" Presented: San Francisco CA, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2014.