Mark Toth

Job market paper

Abstract: This paper analyzes how the spatial structure of housing affects monetary policy transmission. I integrate spatial structure into a monetary business cycle model. Spatial structure matters economically through households' location preferences and residential externalities, summarized by residential concentration. Higher residential concentration dampens consumption responses to interest rate changes through housing demand channels. The effect originates from urban centers and is predominantly driven by location preferences. Using geospatial data, I measure residential concentration for US and Eurozone regions and validate the structural findings in reduced form. My paper identifies residential concentration as a key determinant of spatial heterogeneity in monetary transmission.

Other papers

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between location, liquidity, and prices in housing markets. We construct spatial datasets for German and US cities and show that liquidity and prices decline with distance to the city center. To rationalize these results, we build a structural model with spatial search frictions. We argue that location preferences concentrate buyers in central areas, making markets tighter, more liquid, and driving up prices. Counterfactuals show that suppressing search frictions raises welfare and prices, especially in peripheral areas. Our findings highlight the importance of demand-side preferences and search frictions for understanding liquidity and asset prices.

Software