Research interests: Macroeconomics, Real Estate, Labor, Spatial Economics, Macro-Development
Working papers
Geography, Human Capital and Upward Mobility in Developing Countries [September 2025 Preliminary] slides
Principal Investigator: STEG research grant - £12,000
joint with Alexander Ludwig and Alex Monge Naranjo
We assemble a dataset of 23 million parent–child pairs across 76 developing countries and13,000 subnational regions to study the geography of intergenerational educational mobility in the parts of the world that account for most of the low-educated individuals. We document substantial within-country heterogeneity, with regional differences accounting for over 30% of the globalvariation in upward mobility. Mobility is strongly positively associated with the average education of older cohorts in a region, and strongly negatively associated with educational inequalityamong them. For a subsample of countries with migration histories, we show that causal place effects explain most of the spatial variation in mobility, while selection plays a minor role. These findings point to substantial internal barriers that limit families’ access to opportunity. We develop a quantitative model to match the patterns observed for each country and propose a strategy for quantitative counterfactual exercises to ascertain the aggregate dynamic costs of internal barriers towards labor and education opportunities.
Presented at: SED 2023*, EEA-ESEM 2023, Structural Transformation Conference Exeter (2024)*, STEG X Workshop On Structural Transformation And Macroeconomic Dynamics 2024*, Toulouse Development Seminar 2024*
Monetary Policy, Property Prices and Rents: Evidence from Local Housing Markets [June 2025] SSRN slides
joint with Martin Groiss
Does monetary policy affect house prices and rents differently, and if so, how? We construct a new monthly-regional dataset from 35 million property and rental listings across Germany and exploit exogenous variation in high-frequency monetary policy surprises. Both house prices and rents increase significantly after expansionary monetary policy shocks. The effects are stronger and more persistent for house prices than for rents due to a relatively stronger increase in housing demand and a contraction in the supply for properties for sale. Better financing conditions and higher wages facilitate tenure transitions towards ownership. These findings imply that accommodative monetary policy tends to widen the wealth gap between owners and renters.
Presented at: EEA-ESEM 2024, Residential Housing Markets Vienna 2024 , Free University Research Seminar (2024), Ruhr Macro Day (2025) *, Berlin School of Economics Brown Bag 2025 , SED 2025 , Topics in Time Series Econometrics, Berlin School of Economics (2025), World Congress Seoul (2025), EEA (2025)*
Coverage: Innovation Report , Landaumedia (german)
Understanding Spatial House Price Dynamics in a Housing Boom [Arpil 2025] Revise and Resubmit, 2nd round, at Economic Theory
joint with Leo Kaas and Georgi Kocharkov
We examine the evolution of spatial house price dispersion during Germany’s recent housing boom. Using a dataset of sales listings, we find that house price dispersion hassignificantly increased, which is driven entirely by rising price variation across postalcodes. We show that both price divergence across labor market regions and wideningspatial price variation within these regions are important factors for this trend. Wepropose and calibrate a directed search model of the housing market to understandthe driving forces of rising spatial price dispersion, highlighting the role of housingsupply, housing demand and frictions in the matching process between buyers andsellers. While both shifts in housing supply and housing demand matter for overallprice increases and for regional divergence, we find that variation in housing demand isthe primary factor contributing to the widening spatial dispersion. Our model-baseddemand and supply components correlate strongly with regional fundamentals, sug-gesting that they capture economically meaningful variation in local housing markets.
Presented at: Uni Frankfurt Brown Bag Seminar 2023, EUI Brown Bag Seminar 2023, Uni Toronto Research Seminar 2024*, TU Wien 2024*, Search in Housing Markets Imperial Business School 2024
Invited at: Freie University Berlin (June 2023), FAU Erlangen-Nurnberg macro/labor seminar (July 2024), HO LSE Housing Market Workshop (online December 2024)
Occupational Inheritance in Africa [ March 2023 under major revision]
STEG Working Paper No. 047, slides
Using harmonized cross-sectional surveys of 27 African countries covering around 8 million parents-children matched pairs, this paper studies intergenerational mobility (IM) in occupational attainment in Africa. First, I document substantial heterogeneity across and within African countries and demographic groups and I identify the strongest predictors of IM at the micro and macro level. Second, I examine the hypothesis that human capital is driving IM in Africa. To establish causality, I use as an event study the lifting of primary school fees in five African countries. Correlational evidence suggests that heterogeneity in the occupational outcomes might be attributable to differences in school quality.
Presented at: Frankfurt Brown Bag Seminar 2022, EEA-ESEM 2022, STEG Theme Workshop 0 2022, Frankfurt-Mannheim Workshop 2022, LSE-Opportunity and Inequality Workshop (poster),
Invited at: GEM/GGDC seminar series (May 2023)
(Selected) Work in progress
On the geography of intergenerational mobility in Africa [data collection completed]
Co- Investigator: STEG research grant - £100,000
joint with Alexander Ludwig and Alex Monge Naranjo
Endogenous Housing Supply: Reallocation Across Segmented Rental Markets [very early stage]
joint with Tim Jascheck
The Distributional Cost of Migration: Evidence from German Housing Markets [early stage]
joint with Pranav Mimani
(Including scheduled presentations; * denotes conference presentation by co-author)