Transcript Dinali Wijeratne`s Powerpoint Presentation

Embedding in the Community: Nativity,
Homeownership and Social Capital in Ireland
Dinali Wijeratne
J.E. Cairnes School of Business & Economics
NUI Galway
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Motivation
• Between 1996 and 2006 the foreign born
population in Ireland increased dramatically from
178,347 (5 percent) to 533,165 (13 percent)
• This rapid growth has lead to concerns of
weakening social bonds potentially undermining
social capital of Irish society
• Literature in social capital highlights positive
impact on social capital from homeownership –
this paper explores the interaction between
nativity, homeownership and social capital.
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Research Questions
– How does nativity affect homeownership?
– How do nativity and homeownership
affect social capital?
– Does homeownership have a differential
effect on social capital for the foreign
born?
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Dinali Wijeratne
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Related Literature
• DiPasquale, Denise and Glaser, Edward. (1999)
“Incentives and Social Capital: Are homeowners
better Citizens? Journal of Urban Economics 45,
354-384
• Putnam, R, “E-Pluribus Unum: Diversity and
community in the Twenty-first Century”, 2006
Johan Skytte Prize Lecture
• Glaeser, Edward and Sacerdote, Bruce; (2000),
“The Social Consequences of Housing” National
Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), W/P 8034
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Method
• Prob (Homeownership)=f( Nativity, Controls)
• Prob (Volunteering) =f (Nativity,
Homeownership, Nativity*Homeownership)
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Data
• Census of Population 2006 Sample of
Anonymised Records (COPSAR) micro data - 5
percent sample from each county
• Includes approximately 200,000 observations
with demographic and socio-economic related
variables with a rich data set.
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Social capital ....
• ‘Voluntary’ variable in the data set was used to decide
whether people over the age of 15 years were
involved in any form of social welfare/community
services. For this purpose there were few voluntary
activities listed in the questionnaire i.e. charity,
religious, sports, political or cultural or any other
voluntary activity.
• For the purpose of our binary probit model a dummy
variable was created to represent the social capital
variable - “Yes=1” if an individual was involved in any
of the mentioned volunteering activity or “No=0” if
the person didn’t get involved in any volunteering.
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Descriptive Statistics
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Results
Homeownership
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Results –Homeownership
• Overall, the regression performs well, with the
demographic and educational controls,
statistically significant and signed as expected.
The probability of homeownership increases
with age, rural residence, being female, being
married (and not separated), and being
widowed. Homeownership also increases with
educational attainment.
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N = 144498 Note - the numbers in parentheses are standard errors
***significant at 1 percent level **significant at 5 percent
*significant at 10 percent level
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Results
Social Capital
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N = 144498 Note - the numbers in parentheses are standard errors
***significant at 1 percent level **significant at 5 percent
*significant at 10 percent level
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Conclusions
• Foreign-born less likely to be
homeowners, although gap
declines with years of residence
• Homeowners more likely to
volunteer
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Conclusions
• But no evidence that the foreign-born
are less likely to volunteer controlling
for other factors
• Being a homeowner does not appear
to have influenced the volunteering
activity of the foreign born.
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Limitations/Future Work
• Instrument - for Homeownership to overcome
the causality problem (Y causes X ?)
• Cross sectional data...to overcome household
level heterogeneity -the omitted variable bias
use a different longitudinal panel dataset (i.e
each entity[individual] is observed more than
once)
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THANK YOU!
QUESTIONS?
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