Housing in Europe: a different continent - a continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long and rich history, consisting of around 50 countries with vastly different institutional settings and government policies for housing and an abundance of quasi-natural experiments. Some countries have remarkably rich public data and some institutions and policy assumptions are all but the opposite of those familiar to US institutions. In this introduction we briefly outline the seven papers of this issue that exploit in one way or another this extraordinary richness for research. Each paper provides novel insights and has important implications. Collectively, they illustrate the potential opportunities for new and exciting research on housing in Europe.