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Cityscape: Volume 20 Number 1 | Selected Outcomes of Housing Assistance

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The goal of Cityscape is to bring high-quality original research on housing and community development issues to scholars, government officials, and practitioners. Cityscape is open to all relevant disciplines, including architecture, consumer research, demography, economics, engineering, ethnography, finance, geography, law, planning, political science, public policy, regional science, sociology, statistics, and urban studies.

Cityscape is published three times a year by the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.



Selected Outcomes of Housing Assistance

Volume 20, Number 1

Mark D. Shroder

Michelle P. Matuga

First-Time Homebuyers: Toward a New Measure

Arthur Acolin
University of Washington

Paul Calem
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Julapa Jagtiani
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Susan Wachter
University of Pennsylvania


Existing data sources show divergent estimates of the number of homes purchased by first-time homebuyers as a share of all home purchases. In this article, we use a new dataset to construct a time series of the share of first-time homebuyers. This series, based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, shows a significant decline in the share of first-time homebuyers, particularly among young households, consistent with the decline in homeownership in this age cohort since the early 2000s.


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