The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles

The views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. We are particularly grateful to a large number of researchers at universities and central banks around the world who helped with the construction of the historical dataset. Details can be found in the appendix. We wish to thank Philip Jung, Atif Mian and Gernot Mueller for helpful comments and Katharina Knoll for sharing data on home ownership rates and housing wealth. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) administered by UC Davis. Schularick received financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation. This research was undertaken while Schularick was a Research Fellow of Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research (HKIMR). The generous support of the HKIMR is gratefully acknowledged. Early Elias and Niklas Flamang provided outstanding research assistance. All errors are ours.