Mortgage innovation was good for home ownership

In the United States, there have been two periods during which home ownership rates increased markedly: 1940's-1950's (47% to 65%) and since the mid 1990's (65% to now 70%). Why would there be so drastic increases interrupted by a long period of stable homeownership rates. Clearly this is difficult to justify with demographic changes, which are much more gradual than that. Another justification

Explaining high unemployment and low mobility in Europe

There is an endless stream of papers trying to understand why, on average, unemployment rates are higher in Europe than in North America. I have reported here about several of the recent ones, and there seems no shortage of new explanations. In fact, if one were to build a model with all those explanations, one would probably be left to explain why after all the unemployment rate is not even