Endogenous Life-Cycle Housing Investment and Portfolio Allocation

This paper develops a life-cycle portfolio allocation model to address the effects of housing investment on the portfolio allocation of households. The model employs a comprehensive housing investment structure, Epstein-Zin recursive preferences, and a stock market entry cost. Furthermore, rather than resorting to calibration we estimate the value of the relative risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution. The model shows that housing investment has a strong crowding out effect on investment in risky assets throughout the life-cycle. We further find that the effect of the presence of housing investment on households portfolio allocation is larger than the effect of having EZ recursive preferences.