英语科普小知识 住房自有率高会损害劳工市场.docVIP

Government policies that boost the amount of home ownership in a country are likely to inflict severe damage on the labour market, new research from the University of Warwick suggests. Professor Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick and Professor David Blanchflower from Dartmouth College examine a century of unemployment and home ownership data for the states of the USA from 1900 to 2010. ?Combining those numbers with modern data on millions of randomly sampled Americans, the researchers show there is a powerful link between the housing market and the later health of the economy.? ? Rises in home ownership in a US state are followed by substantial increases in the unemployment rate in the state, a fall in the mobility of its workers, a rise in commuting times, and a drop in the rate of new business formation. ?The authors are careful to check, and they replicate, their findings for different periods of US history. ?The release of their work coincides with a new European study, done independently, which draws the same conclusions. ?That research, by Jani-Petri Laamanen at the University of Tampere, follows the effects of housing market?deregulation（反常）?across the regions of Finland. ? Professor Oswald said: We have been collecting data for decades now and it is appropriate to go public on the results. We find that a high rate of home-ownership slowly decimates the labour market. ?The USA makes a valuable laboratory in which to study this issue, because the different states have a language, currency, and culture in common. ? The Warwick research is agnostic about some of the underlying mechanisms, but the authors believe that high home ownership in an area leads to people staying put and commuting further and further to jobs, thereby creating cost and congestion for firms and other workers; to NIMBY (not in my back yard) activities where home owners block new businesses; and to an ossification of the mobility and dynamism of an economy. ?The authors argument