English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

More Mortgages, More Homes? The Effect of Housing Financialization on Homeownership in Historical Perspective

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons41227

Kohl,  Sebastian
Soziologie des Marktes, MPI for the Study of Societies, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Kohl, S. (2018). More Mortgages, More Homes? The Effect of Housing Financialization on Homeownership in Historical Perspective. Politics & Society, (published online January 27). doi:10.1177/0032329218755750.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0000-3C1F-C
Abstract
Recent research has emphasized the negative effects of finance on macroeconomic performance and even cautioned of a “finance curse.” As one of the main drivers of financial sector growth, mortgages have traditionally been hailed as increasing the number of homeowners in a country. This article uses long-run panel data for seventeen countries between 1920 (1950) and 2013 to show that the effect of the “great mortgaging” on homeownership rates is not universally positive. Increasing mortgage debt appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for higher homeownership levels. There were periods of rising homeownership levels without much increase in mortgages before 1980, thanks to government programs, purchasing power increases, and less inflated house prices. There have also been mortgage increases without homeownership growth, but with house price bubbles thereafter. The liberalization of financial markets might after all be a poor substitute for more traditional housing policies.