In comparison with the large literature on house prices, housing investments have been studied far less. This paper investigates the behavior of private residential investments for the six largest European economies, namely: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom....

In many countries, the cost of housing has greatly outpaced income growth, leading to a housing affordability crisis. Leveraging Canadian loan-level data and quasi-experimental variation in payment-to-income constraints, we document an increasing reliance of first-time homebuyers on financial...