5. Application In the US, homeownership has been attractive because it has typically qualified to be a good long-term financial investment. However, the recent housing crisis and the subsequent economic recession (Dec 2007 - Jun 2009) had a deep negative repercussion, particularly on homeowners. House values depreciated considerably, more than four million foreclosures took place between 2008-2011 and one-fourth of all homeowners were living in houses worth less than the mortgage at the peak of the crisis (Belsky, 2013). Homeownership rate declined from 69.2 percent during Q2, 2004 to 66.4 percent during Q1, 2011 and further to 62.9 percent during Q2, 2016 (Source: US Bureau of the Census). These adverse experiences may have fundamentally altered the perceived benefits of homeownership as a good long- term investment (see Rohe and Lindblad (2014) for a conceptual model). Consequently, it is of much interest to analyze public opinion on homeownership as an investment and examine how socioeconomic factors, demographic variables and exposure to financial distress affect public responses. The current study utilizes the Higher Education/Housing Survey data of March 2011, conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Associates International and sponsored by the Pew Social and Demographic Trends project. Interviews were conducted over telephone between March 15-29, 2011 on a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults living in continental US. After removing missing responses and cleaning the data, we are left with a sample of 1,799 observations for our analysis. Our dependent variable is response to the statement, “Some people say that buying home is the best long-term investment in the United States. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree or strongly disagree?”. Responses are recorded into one of the four categories, however, we append the responses “strongly disagree” and “somewhat disagree” as the former category had less than 5 percent observations. The survey also collected information a wide range of socioeconomic, demographic and geographic variables, some of which are used as covariates in the model. Table 5 presents the definition and summary statistics of all the covariates and the response 18