Economic Logic

I have complained several times already that house ownership should not be encouraged by public authorities, mainly because it prevents dive...

A new and recent trend in the United States has been the decline in the homeownership rate. While I have mentioned before that homeownershi...

Both in Europe and the United States, minorities face significantly higher unemployment rates. In addition, they live in places that are far...

A housing bubble is sustained by expectations of further increases in house prices. There is strong suspicion that this is what happened dur...

Some have blamed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) for the too risky lending to US homeowners during the house price run-up. Actual evide...

The handling of foreclosures in the recent housing crisis in the US has been a serious disaster. The drop in household income made that many...

Among the main culprits of the recent boom and bust in the US housing market that have been identified, the lenders and their excessive push...

One cannot deny that housing bubbles can lead to nasty consequences, as shown in Japan, the US and Spain, for example. What can a policy mak...

Personally, I find wind farms to be beauties. They are very elegant and even in large numbers the wind mills offer a sumptuous spectacle. Bu...

Quality of life indexes are popular in the press. But they are not that easy to compute. While one can easily measure how much one has to wo...

Why has there been a foreclosure crisis in the United States? Two popular explanations are that 1) evil mortgage brokers forced people to ta...

There is a marked seasonal cycle in many housing markets. Sale volumes and house prices are significantly higher in the Summer and lower in ...

In retrospect, the large rise in housing prices before 2007 looks suspect, many would even call this a bubble. But when you observe it in re...

What is the impact of a decrease of house prices on consumption? If you go by the wealth hypothesis, one should see that home owners would r...

The current financial crisis is at least partially blamed on lax lending practices in the US mortgage industry. More mortgages were provided...

House price run-ups, especially when they appear excessive, are difficult to explain. It is it even more difficult to explain how they are n...

The general economic context of where and when you grow up matters. Think, for example, of those raised during the Great Depression in the U...

Even before the crisis hit in the United States, there was talk about how foolish it is to get balloon mortgages, with low teaser rates for ...

Economists have been lambasted for not alerting the public that a bubble was in the making in US real state, except for a few oddballs. Of c...

There is a myth saying that owning a home makes people happier and leads them to contribute more to their community. In an earlier report , ...