European Research Council, 28th of November

“Is your home a safe investment?
Popular wisdom has it that, when deciding where to put your money, nothing is as safe as investing in brick and mortar. Buying a house, in the last century, has become an almost compulsory step towards “financial adulthood”, with two-thirds of Europeans now owning the home they live in. But is this really such a safe investment?”

“Popular wisdom has it that, when deciding where to put your money, nothing is as safe as investing in brick and mortar. Buying a house, in the last century, has become an almost compulsory step towards “financial adulthood”, with two-thirds of Europeans now owning the home they live in. But is this really such a safe investment? This is the question Prof. Moritz Schularick, from the University of Bonn, will address with his newly-awarded ERC Consolidator Grant.
Mortgages are the bedrock of our financial institutions and make up the largest part of household debt. However, the large-scale implications of an economy based on the debt of homeowners are poorly understood. Collecting and analysing data from sixteen different countries from 1870 to 2015, he will try to determine the risks linked to this system. He will study the “boom and bust cycles” that have affected the housing market as close as in 2008, and he will try to establish whether the housing shift has caused inequality in wealth distribution. His project SAFEHOUSE will assess how stable a possession that brings a sense of stability to millions of people actually is.”

Read the full article here.