Unemployment and home-ownership

Oswald (mimeo, University of Warwick, 1996) theorizes that a secular rise in homeownership constitutes a possible explanation for the observed rise in unemployment in Europe. Our results provide support for this notion. In particular, the results based on the regional data on Finnish labour districts imply that a 10% difference in the owneroccupation rate is associated with a 1 percentage point difference in the unemployment rate. The results are tentative, since the regressions are based on a small number of observations.