Over the last decade the Republic of Ireland experienced an unprecedented economic boom, which contributed to equally dramatic demographic and housing market booms. Using data from the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions and other relevant sources, this article examines the...

Home ownership sectors in most European countries have experienced growth in recent decades and by the mid-1990s the majority of EU15 households were home owners. While a great deal of attention has been paid to the rise in home ownership per se, the extent to which households in different EU...

This paper examines the experience of households in two adjacent countries, Germany and the Netherlands, both of which have relatively modest levels of home ownership but significantly different housing systems. Population growth is slowing down in Germany, while it is still increasing in the...

In recent decades, more and more European households have become home owners. Typically, this has been achieved with the help of a loan, repaid over a number of years to cover a proportion of the purchase price. Some households in some countries and at some times experience financial hardship in...

With homeownership central to the national economy and U.S. housing policy, the drop in homeownership rates could have long-term negative consequences. A growing body of research argues that alternative homeownership products, such as limited equity cooperatives and lease-to-own models, can...

Using German regional data for 1998, 2002 and 2006, this study reexamines the Oswald hypothesis, the conjecture that high levels of home ownership lead to inferior outcomes in regional labor markets. Including a set of controls for regional unemployment rates, three different econometric models...

We show that the lightly regulated non-bank mortgage originators contributed disproportionately to the recent boom-bust housing cycle. Using comprehensive data on mortgage originations, which we aggregate at the county level, we first establish that the market share of these independent non-bank...

Despite diversity in market and policy frameworks, late twentieth century housing systems across industrialised economies in East Asia became increasingly focused on facilitating home ownership. Governments became characteristically interventionist in the housing sector, which was assumed to...

Homestead exemptions to personal bankruptcy allow households to retain their home equity up to a limit determined at the state level. Households that may experience bankruptcy thus have an incentive to bias their portfolios towards home equity. Using US household data from the Survey of Income...

In this paper we present evidence that homeowners are happier than nonhomeowners and it is homeownership that causes the difference in happiness. The data used is for seventeen Latin American countries obtained from the LatinBarometer surveys. The association between homeownership and happiness...