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Is Student Loan Debt Discouraging Homeownership Among Young Adults?, Jason N. Houle, Lawrence Berger

Dartmouth Scholarship

Amid concern that rising student loan debt has social and economic consequences for young adults, many suggest that student loan debt is leading young adults to forgo home buying. However, there is little empirical evidence on this topic. In this study, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to estimate associations of student loan debt with homeownership, mortgage amount, and home equity. We use a variety of methodological techniques and test several model specifications. While we find a negative association between debt and homeownership in some models, the association is substantively modest in size and is …