TY  - JOUR
AU  - Chambers, Matthew
AU  - Garriga, Carlos
AU  - Schlagenhauf, Donald E
TI  - Did Housing Policies Cause the Postwar Boom in Homeownership?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18821
PY  - 2013
Y2  - February 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w18821
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18821
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18821.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Matthew Chambers
Towson University
Department of Economics
Towson, MD  21252
Tel: 410-704-3576
E-Mail: mchambers@towson.edu

Carlos Garriga
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
P.O. Box 442
St. Louis, MO 63166
Tel: 314-444-7412
Fax: 314-444-8731
E-Mail: carlos.garriga@stls.frb.org

Donald Schlagenhauf
Department of Economics
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL  32306
Tel: 850-644-3817
E-Mail: dschlage@mailer.fsu.edu
M1  - published as Matthew Chambers, Carlos Garriga, Don E. Schlagenhauf. "Did Housing Policies Cause the Postwar Boom in Home Ownership?," in Eugene N. White, Kenneth Snowden, and Price Fishback, editors, "Housing and Mortgage Markets in Historical Perspective" University of Chicago Press (2014)

M3  - presented at "Universities Research Conference", September 23-24, 2011
AB  - After the collapse of housing markets during the Great Depression, the U.S. government played a large role in shaping the future of housing finance and policy. Soon thereafter, housing markets witnessed the largest boom in recent history. The objective in this paper is to quantify the contribution of government interventions in housing markets in the expansion of U.S. homeownership using an equilibrium model of tenure choice. In the model, home buyers have access to a menu of mortgage choices to finance the acquisition of a house. The government also provides special programs through provisions of the tax code. The parameterized model is consistent with key aggregate and distributional features observed in the 1940 U.S. economy and is capable of accounting for the boom in homeownership in 1960. The decomposition suggests that government policies have significant importance. For example, the expansion in maturity of the fixed-rate mortgage to 30 years can account for 12 percent of the increase. Housing policies, such as the introduction of the mortgage interest deduction or the taxation of housing services can have significant effects on homeownership.
ER  -