Estimation of Spanish Households’ Duration of Residence from Data on Current Residence Time

The study of the housing market’s peculiarities is of great interest, since they influence the economy and welfare of a given country.Households’ duration of residence plays a key role for explaining private decisions (as buying or renting a house) as well as public decisions (politics oriented to increase the leasing offer or to reduce the cost when entering a house for the first time). Despite of the relevance of this durable good in socio-economics, we are not aware of any investigation on the households’ duration of residence in Spain, which constitutes an extra motivation for performing such a study. The goal of the present work is inferring the distribution of households’ duration of residence from data on current residence time. The Theory of Renewal Processes will be a key tool in our study. Our data come from the Survey of Family Budgets (1980 and 1990) and from the Complete Panel Survey of Homes in the EU (2000). The richness of these data allows for an evaluation of the heterogeneity of the duration of residence according to some variables of interest: tenure, geographic localization, total salary, and value of the housing.