This panel is one of two in a symposium on the comparative political economy of housing within Europe. Papers in this panel focus on the policy and political determinants of housing booms, as well as the implications of wide-spread private home-ownership on major welfare programs, inequality and electoral coalitions. The first paper (Anderson and Kurzer) outlines how mortgage tax policies and financialization have transformed Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden into (household) debt accumulation states that prioritize private home-ownership. They further detail how pro-homeownership policies have displaced social housing in national welfare policy in these countries. The second paper (Flynn) discusses the impact of housing policy on inequality and social stratification within the welfare state. Flynn demonstrates how housing policy prompts the formation of new political constituencies and consequently shapes their economic preferences and political power. The third paper (Fuller, Johnston and Regan) explains how corporatist wage-setting institutions and national housing finance systems interact in their effects on housing prices in Europe. Finally, Schwartz re-examines the private homeownership/welfare state trade-off, that maintains that front-loaded mortgage payments in a households’ early career reduces their preferences for general taxation to finance the welfare state. Schwartz notes that there is not an inherent trade-off between mass homeownership and a generous welfare state (notably a generous state pension scheme), but rather that this trade-off depends on how homeownership and welfare (pensions) are financed.