Decisoni sulla casa, proprietà e volatilità del prezzo

When making the decision either to rent or buy a place to live, there are two broad categories of factors that must be considered. The first and most obvious category represents the financial aspects of your decision. The second category is a set of personal and emotional factors, which are more intangible but play an important role in the decision to rent or buy. The italian house market is a particular market because seems that people have to buy an house considering only emotional factors as driving forces. In order to study a good house versus rent decision process my thesis starts with a review of previous studies on housing, then I'm try to develop a model based on preferences maximization. The utility model shows a closed form solution for the optimal quantity of housing investment and saving. As result, in my model I get that the average of the house price is a relevant indicator: as the average house price increases, household tends to consume more house quantity, i.e they want to buy a certain house size if the house price trend is upward. Moreover also the house price variance is an important variable: more variability in the house market leads people to revise downwards their investment strategies. Our econometric estimations for Italy find that the probability of being owner is higher for females, for hight level of wage and for residents in very small cities. Married people show a considerable high probability to be owner even controlling for wage levels, suggesting higher satisfaction on ownership due to house security or other unobservable aspects. As we expect, more large family has a high probability to be owner even con- trolling for the number of Households' income earners. An interesting result show that male and female have different behavior toward the average and the variance of house price: men are variance-oriented while women are average-oriented investors. In fact for male as the variance increases the probability to buy a flat decrease while for female the variance variable is not significant. On the other hand, female look the average house price: as the average price increases also the owner probability goes up. As final result, for the couple is significant both home average price and variance price. In fact as we forecast, as the average of the house value goes up, then people are induced to buy the house (it is significant at 5% level). With regard the home variability (at 10% level) more uncertainty about house price leads household to reduce the house propensity of home asset.