Homeownership is believed to cause higher unemployment. This is because homeowners face higher mobility costs that limit their job search to local labor markets. Empirical tests of this prediction have yielded mixed results so far, possibly due to the endogeneity of homeownership. This paper proposes that the privatization of public housing in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain was a substantial policy shock that generated largely exogenous assignment of homeownership to individual households. This facilitates a new test of the effects of homeownership on mobility and unemployment: First, our empirical results do not reject that homeownership reduces mobility. Second, our results are inconsistent with homeownership increasing unemployment.

据信房屋所有权会导致更高的失业率。这是因为房主面临更高的出行成本，将他们的工作限制在本地劳动力市场。迄今为止，对这种预测的经验测试得出的结果好坏参半，这可能是由于房屋所有权的内生性造成的。本文提出，铁幕倒台后中欧和东欧的公共住房私有化是一项重大的政策冲击，在很大程度上导致了住房所有权外生地分配给单个家庭。这有助于重新测试住房所有权对流动性和失业的影响：首先，我们的经验结果并不否认住房所有权会降低流动性。其次，我们的结果与房屋所有权增加和失业率不一致。