Word: barkers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...maybe the argument is flawed. New research by David Barker of the University of Iowa and Eric Miller of the Congressional Budget Office indicates that homeownership actually has little to no effect on how kids do in school. Their paper, "Homeownership and Child Welfare," which appears in the summer issue of Real Estate Economics, is drumming up interest in housing-policy circles for calling into question one of the basic rationales for encouraging people to own homes. It's yet another idea - like house prices always go up, and down payments aren't that important - being re-evaluated...
...problem, though, is that the differences in the raw data went away once Barker and Miller controlled for other variables - like what language was spoken at home and whether a parent had lost...
...five years, the difference was insignificant for families living in apartments and town homes, and after 10 years, it was also insignificant for those in traditional single-family houses. "For people who have stayed put for a long time, there's really no difference between ownership and rental," says Barker. One theory about why that would be the case: moving into an owned home is more likely to signify a good event has taken place (a new job in a new town, say), whereas moving into a rented home is more likely to signify a bad turn (parents getting divorced...
...course of the research, Barker and Miller tested additional variables to see if they could find other things affecting educational outcomes. One variable that influenced test scores even more than homeownership: whether a family owned a car. What to make of that? Well, maybe cars are important. Or, maybe neither cars nor houses are important in and of themselves, but both are good at signaling a lack of financial strain. "If parents have income coming in, then they are more likely to be able to afford a house or a car, and that's a more regular, less stressful environment...
...breaks and subsidies sent the way of homeowners might do many things, but helping the nation's children doesn't necessarily appear to be one of them. "You can't conclude that by making more people into homeowners you can cause all these other good things to happen," says Barker, "because maybe these people are different in the first place...