Author: Camila Weber

We would like to invite you to a pre-conference workshop at the European Population Conference 2026 in Bologna:

New Data and Tools to Study the Demography of Social Mobility

📅 Tuesday, 3 June 2026, 10:00–13:00

📍 Room P, EPC venue, Bologna

The workshop presents new data sources and methodological tools to study social mobility from a demographic perspective. Presentations will cover intergenerational mobility in homeownership and the development of a new macro-level comparative database on social mobility. The workshop will also include a 90-minute short course, “Simulating Synthetic Life Histories with the MicSim Package in R: An Application to Intergenerational Transmission of Homeownership.” The session will feature hands-on R code and introduce participants to continuous-time microsimulation for generating synthetic life histories in a linked-lives framework. Beyond the presentations and short-course, the workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in these topics and to ignite exchange across projects and approaches.

The workshop is co-organized by Selçuk Bedük, Philipp Lersch, Márton Medgyesi, Sergi Vidal, and Sabine Zinn.

Further details on the programme and registration will follow shortly.

We hope to see you there.

We are pleased to announce the release of the DECIPHE Contextual Database: Demographic, Institutional, and Normative Contexts of Intergenerational Homeownership in Europe by Byambasuren Dorjnyambuu and Márton Medgyesi, now available in open access via Zenodo.

The dataset provides a comprehensive cross-country resource on the institutional and normative contexts shaping intergenerational homeownership across Europe. It includes 134 indicators for 27 EU countries and the United Kingdom, covering national, regional (NUTS1–3), and birth cohort levels. Indicators are organised into five key dimensions: demographic change, housing systems, welfare state characteristics, homeownership-related norms, and socio-economic conditions.

Drawing on 14 major international data sources, including Eurostat, the OECD, and the European Mortgage Federation, the database supports multilevel comparative research. It serves as a valuable tool for researchers seeking to contextualise and interpret micro-level analyses of homeownership dynamics within a broader European framework.

For full data and documentation, visit the Zenodo record.

A new version of the MicSim R package by Sabine Zinn, Felix von Heusinger and Camila Weber is now available — bringing enhanced performance and new examples to support researchers.

MicSim enables researchers to simulate individual life courses using continuous-time microsimulation. Whether you’re modeling demographic transitions, educational pathways, family formation, or migration flows, MicSim offers a flexible framework for applications in demography, social sciences, and epidemiology. Life-course trajectories are defined using a continuous-time multi-state model, as described in Zinn (2014).

What’s New in This Version:

• New examples by Alex Lepe and Felix von Heusinger showcase practical applications of MicSim in research.
• Improved simulation engine: The ‘duration’ argument is now optional when not required, streamlining the simulation process.
• Enhanced usability: Several refinements have been made to improve the overall user experience.

For full documentation and details, visit the MicSim CRAN page. 

A new working paper by E. Benassi and S. Bedük provides new evidence on young people’s homeownership in Europe. The authors find that homeownership at ages 25 to 35 has declined sharply across cohorts born in the 1970s to 1990s, with smaller but still notable declines at ages 40 to 50. Declines at earlier ages, more common among the economically advantaged, likely reflect delayed entry into homeownership, while declines at later ages, concentrated among the disadvantaged, suggest exclusion from ownership altogether.

The authors also show that cross-cohort declines are not explained by differences in the composition of work and family characteristics between cohorts, pointing to more structural factors such as rising house prices.

The study draws on EU-SILC data from 2005 to 2020, covering 24 European countries. It is open access at SocArxiV.

Benassi, E., & Bedük, S. (2025). Young People’s Homeownership in Europe: Delayed or Out of Reach? A Research Note.

A new working paper by S. Bedük, E. Benassi and P. Lersch shows that the relative chances of homeownership between those with and without homeowner parents have remained largely stable across Europeans born in the 1950s to the 1980s. In other words, the intergenerational persistence of homeownership has not changed across these cohorts, as homeownership declined proportionally for both groups. However, this pattern varies considerably between countries, with the authors highlighting the role of national levels of parental homeownership in explaining these differences.

While such relative mobility has been stable, absolute mobility tells a different story. Downward mobility (children of homeowners who rent) rose from 16% to 36%, while upward mobility (children of renters who own) fell from 25% to 9% between the 1950s and 1980s cohorts.

The study draws on EU-SILC data from 2011 and 2019, covering 27 European countries. It is open access at SocArxiV.

Bedük, S., Benassi, E., & Lersch, P. M. (2025). Trends in relative and absolute mobility of homeownership in Europe.

A new open-access study by Sergi Vidal and co-authors in Population, Space and Place shows that separation sharply reduces the likelihood of owning a home—and that regaining ownership is mostly tied to repartnering. Using 1991–2019 panel data from England & Wales (BHPS/Understanding Society) and Germany (SOEP) and multilevel logistic models, the authors find that homeownership rates rise with time since separation primarily because many people form new unions; those who remain single—especially with lower socioeconomic status—rarely return to ownership. The study concludes that separation has long-term effects on housing careers and can widen housing inequalities, particularly in contexts like England & Wales where homeownership is the dominant tenure.

Citation: Mikolai, J., Kulu, H., Thomas, M. J., & Vidal, S. (2025). Time since separation, repartnering, and homeownership in England and Wales, and Germany. Population, Space and Place, 31(6), e70073.

On August 1st, 2025, Bettina Hünteler joined the DECIPHE project as a new member. As a postdoctoral researcher at DIW Berlin in Philipp Lersch’s team, her work will focus on explaining variations in the persistence of homeownership across countries and over time. Bettina is a trained sociologist and demographer who holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cologne. Before joining DECIPHE, she worked as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and at the University of Cologne. In addition to her work on the intergenerational transmission of homeownership and wealth, she is interested other aspects of social inequality—such as health—and how they relate to the family and migration, integrating the life course perspective and both within- and between-individual heterogeneity.