(Job Market Paper)

Aging populations, driven by low fertility rates and increasing longevity, are a defining trend in most advanced economies. This demographic shift has far-reaching implications for asset prices and rates of return. This research investigates the relationship between demographic change and house prices. Using a quantitative life-cycle model calibrated to German microdata, I document the following: In line with past trends (1) demographic factors have contributed significantly to the long-term rise in housing prices of which much can be attributed to indirect general equilibrium effects of falling real rates. (2) Based on projected demographic trends, the model suggests that over the remainder of the 21st century declining populations and rising old-age dependency ratios place downward pressure on real house prices while (3) the composition of wealth shifts from capital to housing wealth mitigating the drop in real rates.

This paper explores the aggregate and distributional effects of loan-to-value (LTV) tightening using a Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. Households in the model face income risk, housing decisions, and collateral constraints. The tightening of the LTV affects the economy through aggregate demand effects. General equilibrium channels amplify the impact of stricter LTV limits, disproportionately affecting borrowers with high LTV limits. Monetary policy accommodation mitigates these effects, reducing the costs of stricter LTV regulations.

(ECB Working Paper No. 2024/2962)

The European fiscal governance framework remains incomplete, leading to challenges in coordinating policy responses when facing economic shocks, and hampering the transmission of the single monetary policy. Against this backdrop, we provide a framework to assess a proposal for a Central Fiscal Capacity (CFC) in the euro area, aimed at stabilizing the business cycle, promoting sovereign debt sustainability as well as reducing the procyclicality of public investment. We develop a two-region DSGE model with a permanent CFC that allocates resources based on the relative output gap of the two regions while earmarking a fraction for public investment and imposing fiscal adjustment requirements for the high-debt region.

(Draft available soon)

In this project we explore consumption behavior of households separated by tenure choice. For this purpose we add a housing decision to a standard incomplete markets lifecycle model and estimate the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) for renters, mortgagors and outright owners from model simulations. We document the bias of the common Blundell, Pistaferri and Preston (BPP) estimator using the true MPCs from the model and compare contemporaneous MPCs to dynamic consumption responses to income shocks.

Ph.D. Advanced Course, TA to Prof. Jesús Bueren in 2020/2021, 2021/2022 and 2022/2023.

Ph.D. Advanced Course, TA to Prof. Alexander Monge-Naranjo in 2022/2023.

Ph.D. Advanced Course, TA to Prof. Russell Cooper in 2020/2021.