Home Ownership and Job Satisfaction

This paper investigates the link between job satisfaction and home ownership. We explicitly focus on the effect of a transition from non-ownership to ownership on the self-reported job satisfaction scores. In other words, we concentrate on the change in job satisfaction response for individuals observed right before and after the transition. Utilizing the panel feature of the British Household Panel Survey, we find that transition to ownership reduces job satisfaction within a year following the purchase—controlling for observed variation and unobserved heterogeneity. The reduction in job satisfaction is sharper when the purchase is financed through a mortgage. We also test if this pattern persists over years. We show that the initial reduction in job satisfaction is more than doubled within 3 years after the transition for both categories of ownership. We conclude that home ownership may be a constraint for the career prospects of the employed workers, since it reduces mobility and forces them to become more dependent on the local labor market conditions. These concerns are deeper in case of a debt-financed ownership.