Towards The Upturn Of Residential Mortgage Markets: Which Policies For The European Context?

From the beginning of the global financial downturn, the observation of residential mortgage market drivers has been focused in investigating the role in triggering the world crisis. Today, we want to analyze how the residential mortgage market could support the upturn and, consequently, how it could help to solve the present situation. What is the impact of the global financial crisis on European residential mortgage markets? Can we identify common drivers that can help us in understanding mortgage markets trends? And if this is the case, what suggestions for policy purposes can we derive from those trends? Also, alongside similarities, there are certainly significant and country specific differences that can support or restrain the development of European residential mortgage markets. This study enters the wide international debate about the global financial downturn and, as a first step, has the aim to supply a deep analysis of residential mortgage market trends in some of the most relevant European countries. As a second step, the survey will investigate the most relevant key variables of the residential mortgage supply with the goal of highlighting analogies and differences at cross-border level and to identify the most relevant trends. In particular, by identifying the most important drivers of residential mortgage markets across Europe, this paper wishes to provide some suggestions on possible policies for the upturn of residential mortgage markets and, also, it aims at verifying the opportunity of developing supranational or country-specific actions.