The objective of this paper is to understand the sources of the boom in home ownership between 1940 and 1960. The increase over this period was five times larger than the recent episode 1996-2004. In the post-depression period the government opted to intervene and regulate housing finance,...

Under the identification strategy that only innovations to productivity can have a permanent impact on labor productivity, Gali (1999) finds that the contribution of productivity shocks to aggregate fluctuations is negligible. More recently, Fisher (2006) extends Galis's identification to allow...