Housing quality has improved dramatically for most low-income households, but they are paying much larger shares of their income for it. Many discussions of the bottom of the market focus on either the rising costs (the 'bad' news) or the rising quality (the 'good' news). Both points of view...

In this paper, we scrutinise Oswald's evidence that home-ownership and unemployment are correlated across the US states. In order to abstract from state fixed-effects in levels, we analyse the cross-sectional variation in changes in home-ownership and unemployment rates between 1970 and 1990....