In contrast to many other countries, Switzerland generally has not seen soaring house prices in the 2000s and house prices have only recently started to diminish slightly. Also, Swiss authorities do not engage in trying to increase the homeownership rate much above its current level. In this...

After rising for a decade, the U.S. homeownership rate peaked at 69 percent in the third quarter of 2006. Over the next two and a half years, as home prices fell in many parts of the country and the unemployment rate rose sharply, the homeownership rate declined by 1.7 percentage points. An...