According to the literature on the relationship between the migration distance and housing tenure choice, the probability of occupying a housing unit as an owner is lower with a longer migration distance due to insufficient information on the housing ...
According to the literature on the relationship between the migration distance and housing tenure choice, the probability of occupying a housing unit as an owner is lower with a longer migration distance due to insufficient information on the housing market at the destination. Furthermore, this study empirically demonstrates that the insufficiency of information appears with the migration across the border of regions rather than simply depending on the distance of migration. In Korea, locality across regions has been obvious from the past and migration across regions does not occur frequently due to the heterogeneity across regions. As the uncertainty in the housing market increases, economic agents who have a risk-averse preference would become less likely to occupy the house as owners. According to the empirical results based on the Population and Housing Census 2020 from Korea Statistics, the likelihood of owner-occupancy from the migration across regions is lower than that from the migration within an area (i.e., city, county, or ward) by 5.4 percentage points. Additionally, when the analysis is restricted to the migration across regions, the owner-occupancy rate does not exhibit statistically significant differences in general between migration among neighboring and remote areas. This implies that whether or not the migration crosses the border of regions is more important than how far the household migrates with respect to the drop in the owner-occupancy rate with migration.