Dear all, we kindly invite you to our next ECON Theory and Policy Seminar Talks on Monday and Tuesday: Monday, April 22, 2024 from 4:00-5:30 pm (Seminarroom DA green 04, Freihaus Buidling, green area, 4th floor) Georgi Kocharkov (Deutsche Bundesbank) https://www.bundesbank.de/en/georgi-kocharkov “Understanding Spatial House Price Dynamics in a Housing Boom” 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 widening spatial price variation within these regions are important factors for this trend. We propose and estimate 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 within labor market regions. and on Tuesday, April 23, 2024 from 4:00-5:30 pm (Seminarroom DB yellow 04, Freihaus Buidling, yellow area, 4th floor) Piotr Denderski (University of Leicester) https://sites.google.com/site/piotrdenderski/ "Wealth, Quits and Layoffs" Using worker-level panel data we document that current wealth predicts the probability that a worker transitions from employment to non-employment. Low-wealth workers face higher probability than the median worker, but so do the high-wealth workers. This U-shaped relationship is robust to a battery of controls and suggests that wealth feeds back into the income process, creating a novel interaction between wealth and income distributions. We extend the standard incomplete markets model a la Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett to include search frictions and jobs with heterogeneous unemployment risk and show that it can replicate our findings because i) low wealth workers optimally accept higher risk jobs in order to leave unemployment faster, and ii) high wealth workers voluntarily quit to enjoy more leisure. Accounting for the non-trivial interactions between wealth and non-employment matters for the quantification of the precautionary savings motive, wealth distribution, and wealth mobility. Further Events: https://www.tuwien.at/en/mg/econ/events Best, Julia Hutter for Alexia Fuernkranz-Prskawetz Julia Hutter TU Wien Institute of Statistics and Mathematical Methods in Economics Research Group Economics Phone: +43 1 58801 10531 Mail: julia.hutter@tuwien.ac.at<mailto:julia.hutter@tuwien.ac.at> https://econ.tuwien.ac.at/