This study examines how lifetime inflation and housing price experiences influence homeownership decisions from an Experience-Based Learning (EBL) perspective, with a particular focus on Korea’s jeonse lease system. Using the 1998–2023 Korea Labor...
This study examines how lifetime inflation and housing price experiences influence homeownership decisions from an Experience-Based Learning (EBL) perspective, with a particular focus on Korea’s jeonse lease system. Using the 1998–2023 Korea Labor & Income Panel Study (KLIPS), we construct experience-weighted measures of inflation, house-price growth, and jeonse-price growth with a decay parameter of λ=0.97 and estimate weighted logistic models with age and region fixed effects. The results show that inflation experiences significantly increase the probability of homeownership, with core inflation exerting the strongest effect. While inflation and house-price fluctuation experiences exhibit similar magnitudes, jeonse-price fluctuation experiences display larger and more persistent effects. These findings suggest that although inflation experiences strengthen preferences for real assets, the jeonse system serves as a key institutional channel driving transitions from renting to owning in Korea. The results highlight the importance of stabilizing both macroeconomic prices and the jeonse market to support housing-market stability.