{
  "schemaVersion": "1.2",
  "slug": "stocks-are-not-flows",
  "title": "Stocks Are Not Flows: An Identification Audit of Investor Pressure and Tenure Change in England",
  "shortTitle": "Stocks are not flows",
  "url": "https://evidence-press.pages.dev/releases/stocks-are-not-flows/",
  "oneLine": "England's tenure shift is real; the aggregate housing data do not reveal how much, if any, was caused by rising resources at the top.",
  "abstract": "Among English households whose household reference person was aged 25 to 44, owner occupation fell by 11.95 percentage points and private renting rose by 12.33 points between 2008-09 and 2018-19. This reproducible audit shows why those near-mirror movements, together with public price, rent, mortgage-rate, supply, and dwelling-stock series, cannot uniquely attribute any share of the shift to wealthy investors. The registered design admits observationally equivalent credit, supply, demographic, tax, and resource mechanisms, so the planned structural estimation was stopped. The result is neither a positive nor a zero causal estimate: it is a documented identification boundary and a concrete agenda for better measurement.",
  "datePublished": "2026-08-01",
  "dateModified": "2026-08-01",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.21740339",
  "doiUrl": "https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21740339",
  "conceptDoi": "10.5281/zenodo.21740338",
  "pdfUrl": "https://github.com/ipitchford/stocks-are-not-flows/releases/download/v1.0.0-preprint/stocks-are-not-flows-v1.0.0.pdf",
  "altPdfUrl": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipitchford/stocks-are-not-flows/main/paper/stocks-are-not-flows-v1.0.0.pdf",
  "zenodoUrl": "https://zenodo.org/records/21740339",
  "repoUrl": "https://github.com/ipitchford/stocks-are-not-flows",
  "releaseUrl": "https://github.com/ipitchford/stocks-are-not-flows/releases/tag/v1.0.0-preprint",
  "markdownUrl": "https://evidence-press.pages.dev/releases/stocks-are-not-flows/index.md",
  "bibtexUrl": "https://evidence-press.pages.dev/releases/stocks-are-not-flows/cite.bib",
  "audioUrl": "https://evidence-press.pages.dev/assets/audio/stocks-are-not-flows.mp3",
  "imageUrl": "https://evidence-press.pages.dev/assets/og/stocks-are-not-flows.png",
  "coverArtUrl": "https://evidence-press.pages.dev/assets/art/stocks-are-not-flows.svg",
  "media": [],
  "authors": [
    "Anonymous"
  ],
  "license": "CC0-1.0",
  "status": "unrefereed-preprint",
  "verification": {
    "peerReviewed": false,
    "independentlyReproduced": false,
    "formallyVerified": false,
    "internallyReplayed": true,
    "detail": "Anonymous, unrefereed public discussion preprint. The public accounting paths and registered synthetic design checks were deterministically replayed, but the work has not been independently reproduced, peer reviewed, formally verified, or accepted by experts. The response design is synthetic rather than an estimated model of England. The audit establishes a design-conditioned non-identification result, not a positive or zero causal effect of wealthy investors."
  },
  "provenance": {
    "aiGenerated": false,
    "aiAssisted": true,
    "generatedBy": [
      "Automated research and coding tools"
    ],
    "humanRole": "Project selection, mediation, review, and publication management; the scholarly creator is cited as Anonymous.",
    "disclosure": "Automated tools assisted discovery, implementation, testing, critique, and drafting; they are not authors. The public discussion preprint is cited as Anonymous."
  },
  "problem": null,
  "keywords": [
    "housing tenure",
    "private renting",
    "homeownership",
    "wealth inequality",
    "housing investors",
    "structural identification",
    "partial identification",
    "English Housing Survey",
    "reproducible research",
    "public discussion preprint"
  ],
  "keyResults": [
    "For English households with a household reference person aged 25-44, the reconstructed owner share fell from 60.5270% in 2008-09 to 48.5783% in 2018-19, while private renting rose from 22.1325% to 34.4594%.",
    "The near-offsetting stock changes do not reveal gross owner-to-landlord transactions, purchaser type, purchaser resources, or the origin of funds.",
    "In the registered synthetic response design, the focal top-resource response lies in the span of admitted rival and nuisance responses, so the planned structural fit cannot uniquely attribute the historical shift.",
    "The correct decision is FAIL-IDENT-0: stop unique causal attribution, publish the boundary, and move to better measurement and source-backed partial identification.",
    "The audit reports no causal coefficient, no historical contribution share, and no empirical England partial-identification interval; it also does not establish that wealthy investors had no effect."
  ],
  "evidencePackage": "A 30-page anonymous preprint; Python source and a pinned dependency lock; 135 tests passed under normal and optimized Python; frozen IDENT-0, public Gate A, deterministic replay, and partial-identification reports; seven redistributed official public-source objects with receipts and Open Government Licence attribution; derived accounting tables and deterministic figures; SHA-256 manifests, negative and sign-reversing controls, and a publication-integrity report.",
  "openProblems": [
    "Construct a linked measurement that jointly records gross property-use conversion, purchaser landlord status, and the purchaser's pre-purchase non-housing resources, while documenting linkage error, anticipation, legal-form switching, reclassification, and equilibrium spillovers.",
    "Develop source-backed bounds for the focal and rival response classes, then compute an empirical sharp identified set for England; near-zero, signed, and sign-ambiguous results must all remain admissible.",
    "Reproduce the public accounting layer independently from the original official downloads and implement the observation-map audit without reusing the repository's code or intermediate files.",
    "Obtain the survey-design information needed to attach defensible uncertainty intervals to the combined 25-44 English Housing Survey tenure shares.",
    "Compare alternative linked-listing definitions of investor acquisition and owner-to-landlord conversion, and quantify their sensitivity to listing windows, platform coverage, purchaser type, and funding-source misclassification.",
    "Use the discriminator theorem as a pre-analysis value-of-information test for candidate administrative, tax, mortgage, ownership, and transaction linkages before committing to a full structural estimation."
  ],
  "relatedWorks": [
    {
      "citation": "Stevenson, G. (2019). The Impact of Inequality on Asset Prices When Households Care About Wealth. MPhil thesis manuscript; Oxford INET seminar record.",
      "url": "https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/events/the-impact-of-inequality-on-asset-prices-when-households-care-about-wealth"
    },
    {
      "citation": "Head, A., Lloyd-Ellis, H., & Stacey, D. (2023). Heterogeneity, Frictional Assignment, and Home-Ownership. International Economic Review, 64(3), 1265-1308.",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12624"
    },
    {
      "citation": "Bracke, P. (2021). How Much Do Investors Pay for Houses? Real Estate Economics, 49(S1), 41-73.",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12280"
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    {
      "citation": "Bank of England (2023). Has the Private Rental Sector Been Shrinking? Bank Overground.",
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    },
    {
      "citation": "Manski, C. F. (2003). Partial Identification of Probability Distributions. Springer.",
      "url": "https://doi.org/10.1007/b97478"
    },
    {
      "citation": "Tamer, E. (2010). Partial Identification in Econometrics. Annual Review of Economics, 2, 167-195.",
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  ]
}