My home was my castle: Evictions and repossessions in Britain

Using data for 1991 to 1997 Rom the British Household Panel Survey we inves tigate the incidence of housing finance problems, evictions, and repossessi ons. Previous research on repossessions and problematical housing debt in B ritain has focused on cross-sectional data. This paper contributes uniquely to the literature by examining the sequence of household and individual ev ents associated with housing arrears and evictions. Our results show that t he previous experience of financial problems has a significant and positive association with the current financial situation and the probability of ev iction and that negative financial surprises are an important route into fi nancial difficulties controlling for other changes such as divorce or loss of employment. Families with higher income and where the head or his or her spouse is in work have a lower risk of experiencing problems meeting their housing costs. (C) 2000 Academic Press.