Research interests: Macroeconomics, Spatial Economics, Real Estate, Labor (broadly defined), Macro-Development
Publications
Understanding Spatial House Price Dynamics in a Housing Boom
joint with Leo Kaas and Georgi Kocharkov, Economic Theory, March 2026
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 has significantly increased, which is driven entirely by rising price variation across postal codes. We show that both price divergence across labor market regions and wideningspatial price variation within these regions are important factors for this trend. We propose and calibrate a directed search model of the housing market to understand the driving forces of rising spatial price dispersion, highlighting the role of housing supply, housing demand and frictions in the matching process between buyers and sellers. While both shifts in housing supply and housing demand matter for overall price increases and for regional divergence, we find that variation in housing demand is the primary factor contributing to the widening spatial dispersion. Our model-based demand and supply components correlate strongly with regional fundamentals, suggesting 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)
Working papers
Tenure Segmentation over the Housing Cycle: Sale Prices and Rents in Germany [May 2026]
Do house prices and rents move together over the housing cycle? Using German real-estate listings, I construct postcode indices for homes offered for sale and for rent. During the correction that followed the mortgage-rate increase of 2021--2022, initially expensive for-sale markets corrected sharply, while advertised cold rents in the same postcodes did not show a comparable differential decline. The divergence is largest where for-sale prices had risen most relative to local purchasing power during the boom: an interquartile increase in this exposure predicts about a 2.1 percentage-point larger annualized decline in for-sale prices relative to rents. Transaction-price indices show the same correction on the for-sale side, and repeated advertisements show the same within-dwelling pattern. A housing correction can move the asset price of ownership without a comparable decline in advertised cold rents faced by movers.
Geography and Intergenerational Mobility in Developing Countries [May 2026, draft available upon request] slides
Principal Investigator: STEG research grant - £12,000
joint with Alexander Ludwig and Alex Monge Naranjo
We study the geography of educational intergenerational mobility across the developing world. Drawing on harmonized IPUMS census microdata, we assemble a new dataset of more than 23 million parent--child pairs covering 76 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and over 5,000 subnational regions. Three findings emerge. First, the probability that a son born to parents with less than primary schooling completes secondary education varies dramatically across and within countries; roughly one third of the global variation arises within national borders. Second, mobility correlates positively with the average schooling of the older cohort and negatively with educational inequality, both across countries and within them. Third, exploiting variation in the age at which children move within countries, we identify sizeable causal exposure effects of regions on mobility, with selection effects accounting for only a modest share. A companion paper builds on these findings to develop and calibrate a spatial quantitative model for the subset of countries for which the necessary data are available.
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*, ESEM 2025 Cyprus, EUI Inequality Seminar 2025*, STEG annual conference 2026 (scheduled)*, ESEM 2026 Abu Dhabi
A Spatial Quantitative Model of Intergenerational Mobility in Developing Countries [May 2026, draft available upon request]
Co-Investigator: STEG research grant - £100,000
joint with Alexander Ludwig and Alex Monge Naranjo
We develop a spatial quantitative model of intergenerational educational mobility for developing countries and calibrate it to seven economies---Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Togo, Nepal, and Brazil---for which the underlying microdata permit a consistent implementation. Heterogeneous families choose locations and education paths, trading off current labor-market opportunities, housing costs, migration costs, and the schooling environment that the local population provides for the next generation. The state space is region-by-milieu, urban or rural; production combines low- and high-skill labor through a skill-biased CES aggregator with location-specific Hicks-neutral and skill-biased productivity terms; intergenerational transitions are estimated as multinomial logits whose intercepts and slopes vary by milieu and parental education. Conditional on data-disciplined transition, labor, housing, and migration blocks, we calibrate a small set of preference parameters internally so that the model maps the historical adult distribution into the observed current one. We then run policy counterfactuals that target rural schooling environments, rural productivity, housing congestion, and migration costs. The counterfactuals point to a quantitative role for the rural production block in shaping aggregate output, and a more limited role for migration and housing frictions in altering long-run human capital. Together, the exercises identify the inherent disparities between rural and urban locations as a first-order constraint on aggregate development.
Presented at: Atlanta FED 2026*) (scheduled) , Econometriy Socienty North America Meeting-Emory University 2026* )(scheduled)
Monetary Policy, Property Prices and Rents: Evidence from Local Housing Markets [February 2026] SSRN slides
joint with Martin Groiss
Does monetary policy affect house prices and rents differently? We combine a large datasetof housing listings across Germany with high-frequency monetary policy surprises. We buildmonthly, quality-adjusted indices for sale prices and new-lease rents across districts. We find thata one-standard-deviation decline in the Shadow Rate increases real house prices (rents) by 3%(0.7%) after 36 months. Monetary easing increases the tightness in both market segments. It boostssearch activity and reduces the inflow of new listings, especially in sales market. Pass-through islarger in districts with high house-price-to-income ratios. Rent effects are stronger where rentalmarkets are thin and where ex-ante household default risk is low. Survey evidence shows morerenter-to-owner transitions, while owners move less. Easing therefore mainly benefits existingowners while raising new-lease rents faced by movers and marginal 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)
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
The Economics of Emerging Adulthood
Traditionally, the stages of life are divided simply into childhood and adulthood. During childhood, parents provide all the necessary resources while during adulthood individuals act on their own. Yet, for many youths, the transition period from childhood to adulthood has been prolonged over the last 50 years leading to a new intermediate phase of life called "Emerging Adulthood".
Emerging adults are often marked by repeated residential changes, college attendance, unstable relationships, and job uncertainty. In this paper, I study theoretically and quantitatively the long-term economic implications of the longer transition time between adolescence and adulthood for parents and their children.
(Including scheduled presentations; * denotes conference presentation by co-author)