Research

Bidder Beware: Intergenerational Wealth Transfers in the Residential Housing Market  (with Jaap Bos and Nils Kok) 
Abstract: Using an unanticipated tax-exemption policy in the Netherlands, we study the effect of wealth transfers on housing market outcomes. We find that buyers who receive a wealth transfer purchase homes that are 20-35% more expensive, and overpay for a given home by 0.5-2.0%, relative to other buyers. Overpayment is driven by the tightness of the local market in which a home is bought. At the local market level, the policy increases prices due to a spillover effect, whereby home buyers who did not receive a transfer similarly raise their bids in response to an influx of wealth transfer recipients.
Conferences: AREUEA-ASSA Conference in San Francisco (2025); AREAUEA International in Cambridge (2023); UEA European Meeting in Milan (2023)

Frontloading Wealth: How Parental Transfers Shape Housing and Savings  (Job market paper - draft coming soon)
Abstract: Parents transfer substantial wealth to their children during their lifetime, but these inter vivos transfers are not well understood. This paper makes three contributions. First, I show that parent-child transfers are predominantly made to finance first-time home purchases, while other life events are largely irrelevant. Second, I develop a stylized two-period altruism model, in which parents trade off facilitating their child’s homeownership against precautionary savings. This model yields straightforward empirical predictions, which are borne out by the data. Finally, I identify the causal effect of parental home-purchase transfers on housing decisions and wealth accumulation, using exogenous variation from a Dutch tax- exemption policy. I find that recipients use transfers entirely to reduce their mortgage principal. Over time, however, the initial wealth increase dissipates, as recipients consume the savings from lower debt service, rather than reinvesting them. 

Welfare Effects of Subsidizing First-Time Homebuyers  (with Max Löffler)
Abstract: Countries around the world subsidize first-time homebuyers. We propose a novel sufficient statistics framework with indivisible housing consumption and tenure choice to analyze both the efficiency and equity implications of such policies. Based on a recent policy change in the Netherlands, whereby transfer taxes were removed for young homebuyers, we estimate the necessary empirical parameters in a quasi-experimental setting using administrative data. We find that subsidizing starters significantly promotes transitions into homeownership, without causing a negative spillover to those who are ineligible. In contrast, we find no evidence of an increase in aggregate prices due to the subsidy.
Conferences: UEA European Meeting in Berlin (2025)

Ethnic Matching in Residential Housing Markets  (with Jaap Bos and Olivier Marie)
Abstract: Housing market access for racial and ethnic minorities has been of interest to researchers and policymakers for decades. However, the housing market experiences of minorities have almost exclusively been studied in the distinctly unique setting of the U.S. market. In this paper, we study homebuyers with migratory background in the Netherlands and discover the presence of ethnic networks as an important driver behind access to homeownership. We begin by documenting that ethnic matching of buyers and sellers is decidedly non-random. Instead, we find a strong preference for within-ethnicity matching between migrant homebuyers and -sellers. Next, we study sale prices, and find that within-ethnicity transactions among migrants sell at a substantial discount, relative to other transactions in a neighborhood, holding fixed the unit’s assessed value. This is inconsistent with ethnic homophily, which would predict price premia in within-ethnicity transactions. Instead, it suggests that migrant buyers frequently rely on sellers from their existing network in order to access homeownership.
Conferences: Annual Meeting of the Scottish Economic Society (2025)