The housing boom also buoyed employment for women, a group with only negligible representation in construction. It's not clear where the increase in jobs occurred that employed women, but Notowidigdo points to health care, financial services, and real estate as likely candidates. "We suspect it's some combination of all those," he says.
All told, a marked increase in housing prices had a significant but short-lived effect on local employment. Were it not for the housing boom, roughly 1.3 million workers who were jobless in 2011 would have been out of a job even earlier—in 2007, say the researchers.
But although the data indicate that the housing boom had a positive effect on the labor market, once the dust settled, related jobs returned to roughly pre-boom numbers. And the boom had more subtle harmful effects: ongoing research indicates that, during the boom years, many recent high-school graduates, seduced by the sudden glut of well-paying jobs, chose work over community college. Yet when the boom ended and jobs evaporated, those same men and women didn't go back to school, and still haven't, creating a hole in educational attainment for a large swath of the population. "That could be very costly to the country," Notowidigdo says.