Does homeownership affect the outcomes of resident children?

Results: children of homeowners have better home environments, high cognitive test scores, and fewer behavior problems than do children of renters.

• Parental homeownership reduces the probability of resident 17-year old children dropping out or giving birth.
• Homeownership also has a positive impact on the graduation rate other than through increased stability, but the size of the impact varies across empirical specifications.
• The total impact of homeownership on a child's mathematical cognitive outcome is to raise it about nine percent compared to a family that rents, holding constant a host of social, demographic, and economic variables.
• Compared with an identical household that rents, these results indicate that residence in an owned home raises a child's reading score by about seven percent.
• The cumulative impact is that homeownership reduces the index of child behavior problems by about three percent, but the lack of statistical significance suggests that the impact could be only one percent.
    
• The Impact of Homeownership on Child Outcomes.   Download full report.

• In 2002, there were over 760,000 pregnancies to women under the age of 20 and some 420,000 births to teens in 2004.
• Despite a 36 percent drop in the teen pregnancy rate between 1990 and 2002 (the most recent data available) and a 33 percent decline in the teen (girls aged 15-19) birth rate between 1991 and 2004, the United States still has the highest teen pregnancy and birth rates in the industrialized world.
  • Rates of teen  pregnancy in the United States are two to six times higher than those in most ofWestern Europe including France,Holland, Denmark, and Sweden.
• Teen childbearing in the United States cost taxpayers (federal, state, and local) at least $9.1 billion in 2004.
• Between 1991 and 2004 there were 6,776,230 births to teens in the United States.