Heterogeneity in Asian American homeownership: the impact of household endowments and immigrant status

Recently, research has begun to investigate the reasons for differences in homeownership rates between Asian and whites. This paper extends this research by examining the heterogeneity that exists across Asian groups in the United States. We find that there are important differences across geographic area, across time, and across groups in the importance of various factors on homeownership propensities. After controlling for household mobility and other socioeconomic characteristics, we find most Asian groups have homeownership rates similar to whites, but Chinese households have homeownership rates 20 percentage points higher than their household characteristics would predict. Part of this may be due to differences in support unmeasured in the data, but future research is needed to better understand the source of this differential.