Duh! No money down increases homeownership

It took a team of three economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and a 50-page working paper to conclude that relaxed lending standards, where little or no down payment was required, caused the homeownership rate to increase.
Admittedly, there are better things to do around here than read another Fed research paper and, with this one (.pdf) appearing to be particularly dense, a brief excerpt from the WSJ Economics Blog will suffice:

The paper, by Matthew Chambers, Carlos Garriga, and Don E. Schlagenhauf, examines changes in home ownership by age cohort. The U.S. population aged in the last decade, boosting the share of the population in age cohorts that are more likely to own a home. But the authors conclude this explains just 16% to 31% of the rise in total home ownership. The introduction of new mortgage products, in particular those that allowed little or no down payment, accounts for 56% to 70% of the increase. Such “loans tend to be the contract of choice for younger cohorts which explains an important part of the increase in the aggregate homeownership rate observed since 1994,” they say. Indeed, while the homeownership rate rose for all age groups in that period, it rose most for households under age 35: it jumped from 37.3% to 43%.

Indeed, there was a housing bubble and young people with no money for a down payment got to participate along with all the other people who lost their collective senses.

It's not clear which is more idiotic - the fact that these lending practices went on for so long or that, only now, economists appear to understand the problem.