This paper studies how banking deregulation affects homeownership. Exploiting the U.S. intra-state and inter-state banking deregulations from 1980s to early 1990s, we find that an exogenous expansion of bank branches increases renters likelihood of becoming homeowners as much as 8.7 percentage points. In addition, the impact is larger on households with low income and high debt-to-income ratios. Our estimated impacts are larger than those estimated from state-level data, suggesting that the heterogeneous effects among households are important towards home ownership. Our findings are robust to potential sample selection bias and functional misspecifications.

本文研究了银行业放松管制如何影响房屋所有权。利用1980年代至1990年代初期美国对州内和州际银行业的放松管制，我们发现银行分支机构的外生扩张使租房者成为房主的可能性增加了8.7个百分点。此外，对低收入和高债务对收入比率的家庭的影响更大。我们估计的影响大于从州级数据估计的影响，这表明家庭之间的异类影响对房屋所有权很重要。我们的发现对于潜在的样品选择偏倚和功能错配是有力的。