Published papers
"Baby Booms and Asset Booms: Demographic Change and the Housing Market" - Journal of Finance (2025) - with Marc Francke
Coverage: The Economist Policy: 2024 Economic Report of the President
"Reaching for Yield and the Housing Market: Evidence from 18th-century Amsterdam" - Journal of Financial Economics (2023).
Coverage: Forbes (2), Forbes (1), The Economist, Trouw
"The Total Return and Risk to Residential Real Estate" - Review of Financial Studies (2021) - with Piet Eichholtz, Thies Lindenthal and Ronan Tallec
"Housing Markets in a Pandemic: Evidence from Historical Outbreaks" - Journal of Urban Economics (2021) - with Marc Francke.
Coverage: Bloomberg (2), Bloomberg (1), Slate, NRC Handelsblad, Financieele Dagblad, Het Parool, De Correspondent, Radio Noord-Holland.
Working papers
"An Alpha in Affordable Housing?" - with Sven Damen and Stijn van Nieuwerburgh
Residential properties with the lowest rent levels provide the highest investment returns to their owners. Using detailed rent, cost, and price data from the United States, Belgium, and The Netherlands, we show that this phenomenon holds across housing markets and time. If anything, low-rent units hedge business cycle risk. We also find no evidence for differential regulatory risk exposure. We document segmentation of investors, with large corporate landlords shying away from the low-tier segment possibly for reputational reasons. Financial constraints prevent renters from purchasing their property and medium-sized landlords from scaling up, sustaining excess risk-adjusted returns. Low-income tenants ultimately pay the price for this segmentation in the form of a high rent burden.
"Buy-to-Live vs. Buy-to-Let: Home Ownership, Property Prices and Neighborhoods" - with Marc Francke, Lianne Hans and Sjoerd van Bekkum
How does property ownership type affect house prices and neighborhoods? We investigate a Dutch legal ban on buy-to-let investments that exploits within-city and between-city variation in its coverage. The ban effectively removes investor demand, which is offset by increased demand from first-time home-owners ("buy-to-live"). Accordingly, we find the ban has a weak positive effect on local property prices. We argue that the increase in buy-to-live demand is driven by expected neighborhood quality improvements: The ban changes the fraction of home ownership in affected neighborhoods and home owners differ significantly from renters. Specifically, affected properties sold post-ban have fewer, older and richer occupants that are more likely to be Dutch-born and have moved-in over short-distances. Our results imply a trade-off for policymakers of creating better-quality neighborhoods through first-time home buyer support against fewer housing opportunities for outsider lower-income residents.
Media coverage: English: The Telegraph, Morningstar, The Guardian, Inman, Reason, Propmodo, Yahoo Finance . Dutch: Financieel Dagblad (front page), NOS, RTL, NRC Handelsblad, Telegraaf (1), Telegraaf (2), NU.nl, NPO 1, Financieel Dagblad (2), Financieel Dagblad (3), Trouw, BNR, Business Insider, Metro, Parool
Policy: Senate Judiciary Committee, California, IMF, CPB
"Shocking Wealth: The Long-Term Impact of Housing Wealth Taxation" - with Peter Koudijs
How do shocks to property taxation affect lifetime wealth accumulation and investment? We examine a unique 18th- century tax reform in Holland which resulted in large and unanticipated changes in the effective tax rates on real estate wealth, plausibly exogenous to the owners and different for each property. We find the reform capitalized into house values in the short-run and had large impacts on household wealth that grew substantially over time. On average, a one percent shock increased wealth at death by 3.5 percent. We show these effects are consistent with the fact that households do not update housing consumption in response to large tax changes: large positive or negative shocks had few impact on the likelihood of selling voluntarily, even in a liquid market with low transaction taxes. Instead, changes in taxation primarily affected annual saving. The shock had a very large impact on foreclosure rates and still affected property-level vacancy and owner-occupancy rates 70 years after the reform. Our findings suggest that shocks to property taxation have large and persistent effects on household wealth and the housing stock.
"The Housing Affordability Revolution" - with Thies Lindenthal and Piet Eichholtz.
We document the long-run evolution of urban housing affordability in seven major European cities from 1500 to 2024. Using nearly half a million rent observations, we construct annual indices of rents and wages and develop new estimates of housing quality, inequality, and expenditure shares. Over this period, real rents increased slowly—by just 0.17 percent annually on average—while housing quality improved substantially even before industrialization. From the 1910s to the 1970s, we document a “housing affordability revolution”: real wages grew markedly faster than rents, housing quality rose sharply, and housing consumption inequality declined—coinciding with large-scale housing policy. Yet housing expenditure shares are higher today than a century ago, not because affordability declined, but because housing consumption increased and household size declined - challenging models with constant expenditure shares. Our findings establish new stylized facts on housing rents, quality, and inequality over five centuries, and highlight the long-run role of preferences, institutions, and policy in shaping affordability.
Media coverage: NOS, Historisch Nieuwsblad, Quantpedia
Some directions of current work-in-progress (selected and always subject to change)
"The impact of suburbanization on urban residents" - with Franklin Qian and Marco Giacolett
"Credit constraints, home-ownership and labor supply" - with Rodney Ramcharan and Mauro Mastrogiacomo
"Paying for Status: The French Experience of Venality" - with Emilie Bonhoure, Olivier Musy, Ronan Tallec
How valuable is social status? There is a wide notion that people care about status, but status is usually endogenously determined making it hard to value it. This project studies venality in pre-revolutionary France, a system where prestigious positions were sold to the highest bidder. We collect data on the prices of positions with different levels of status but similar pay. We show that when status became an explicitly marketable asset, it evolved into one of the most valuable assets in household portfolios.