Rising immigration and falling native-born home ownership: a spatial econometric analysis for New Zealand

Abstract

In the last two decades the foreign-born share of New Zealand’s population increased far faster than in other rich countries. We apply spatial econometric models to a three-wave panel of 1851 census area units to examine impacts of higher foreign-born population shares on home ownership rates, especially for native-born residents. A standard deviation higher foreign-born share is associated with a one-sixth of a standard deviation lower ownership rate for the native-born. Much of the impact is indirect, with higher foreign-born shares in one area spilling over into lower native-born ownership rates elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• home ownership
• spatial spillovers
• New Zealand

JEL CODE:

• J61
• R31

Acknowledgements

Access to the data used in this study was provided by Statistics New Zealand under conditions designed to give effect to the security and confidentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975. The results presented in this study are the work of the authors, not Statistics New Zealand or individual data suppliers. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Figure 1 uses OECD series 5a368e1b-en and d434f82b-en. Not all countries have data in years with NZ censuses; to ensure averages for each year in Figure 1 are for the same group of countries, LUX, IRL, SVK and CHE are excluded. The three OECD groups in Figure 1 have 5, 8, and 10 members.

2 The Dwelling Form set of questions have also become much more complex over time as Statistics New Zealand grapples with implications of increased use of family trusts. A careful discussion of these issues is in the Retirement Policy Research Centre Pension Briefing 2013-4.

3 Only 0.07% of the population in 2013 lived in area units we omitted due to this restriction.

4 Area units are aggregations of adjacent meshblocks with coterminous boundaries. In urban areas an area unit is often a collection of city blocks, while in rural areas they typically correspond to localities or communities. We use the 2017 vintage of area units.

5 Across area units in 2013, the standard deviation (SD) of the native-born ownership rate is 11.9 percentage points. The SD of the foreign-born share is 10.9 percentage points, which is equivalent to the change experienced from 2001 to 2013 in parts of Auckland or Queenstown-Lakes (Figure 2a).

6 An ANOVA shows 12 times more variation in density between area units than within area units.

7 This is estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood (Lee & Yu, 2010), using the Drukker, Prucha, and Raciborski (2013) estimator.

8 Coefficient values for spatial lag terms can be altered by using different normalizations of the spatial weights matrix but the standard errors scale in proportion so statistical significance is unchanged. Moreover, non-lagged parts of the model, and the impacts given by equation (4), are invariant to the spatial weights normalization.

9 One-sixth of a SD is equivalent to a two percentage point fall in the native-born ownership rate. For the foreign-born ownership rate the analogous effect is about one-fifth of a standard deviation. A counterpart to Table 2, for the foreign-born, is available from the authors.