Increasing labour market flexibility is at the top of the European agenda. A new and challenging view is that lack of mobility in the labour market may arise from rigidities in the housing market. This book brings together top European economists to analyse the interaction between housing and labour markets and provides clear policy messages.

This paper studies housing tenure and labour mobility using individual data from the ECHP for five European countries. First, the effect of housing tenure on the unemployed workers' labour mobility is studied using a discrete unemployment duration model with two alternative exits to employment, depending on whether they are associated with a residential change or not. Ownership is found to affect geographical mobility negatively. Second, the results are robust to potential endogeneity of the ownership status and institutional differences across countries. Third, post-unemployment wages are studied. We do not find any effects of the unemployment spell duration and the geographical mobility on wages after controlling for the self-selection bias. [resumen de autor]

This book brings together the expertise of economists, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists in order to integrate diverse perspectives and a broad range of analytical tools in the conceptualisation of labour mobility. It examines how variably the question of labour mobility has translated into the policies, laws, and norms through which the EU as a whole is governed. The contributions focus on the actors – European and national officials, experts, trade union and employers’ organisations – and on instruments implemented by institutions and political organisations – European Agency, coordination systems, European Job Mobility Portal (EURES) – to increase and support mobility within the European Union. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of European/EU studies, migration studies, labour studies, political sociology, and more broadly to comparative politics.

Originally published in 1995. A comprehensive survey of housing policy throughout Europe, anchored in a thorough analysis of the UK, this book is a text for students of housing at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The book considers housing tenure types and looks at standards of living, housing stock, housing allowances and subsidies and European funds. There are separate chapters for France, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands and Sweden. The later chapters focus on Britain and look more in depth at population issues and economics and address regional policy.

The growing literature on comparative European housing policy has played a major part in developing our understanding of the way housing in provided in different countries, and in the way the interaction between the stat, market and civil society is conceptualized. However, much of this analysis is rooted without question in the welfare states of northern Europe – there has been almost no research published in English on the provision of housing in southern Europe. Such research as exists deals with specific feature of housing policy, invariably in a single country. There is probably a better understanding of the housing systems of the former communist countries than those of southern Europe.