I hold positions as Postdoctoral Researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and as Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). There, I am affiliated with the Department of Economics and the Research Institute Economics of Inequality (INEQ). I also act as a consultant to the European Central Bank.
I am an applied economist and my research mainly focuses on economic measurement and macro-economic implications. I am particularly interested in the distributional and spatial dimension of economic phenomena. I have worked on measurement issues related to real estate economics, the dynamics in housing prices and rents, the CPI, as well as the distribution of wealth and Distributional National Accounts.
Currently, I work on measuring (housing) wealth and its distribution, peoples’ knowledge about and perception of their own wealth, differences and potentials of macro-economic indicators based on objective and subjective data, and the improvement of econometric techniques to construct contemporary and historic housing price and cost-of-living indices. I am also exploring new, alternative data sources for economic measurement purposes.
My CV is available here. Here are links to my profiles on LinkedIn and Google Scholar.
orcid.org/0000-0003-2526-3838
Research
Publications
- Estimating Quantile-Specific Rental Yields for Residential Housing in Sydney, Regional Science and Urban Economics 68, 2018, 204 – 225.
- Variation across price segments and locations: A comprehensive quantile regression analysis of the Sydney housing market, forthcoming in Real Estate Economics, doi: 10.1111/1540-6229.12177.
- A hedonic house price index in continuous time, International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis 9(4), 2016, 648 – 670.
Working Papers
- Owner Occupied Housing in the CPI and Its Impact On Monetary Policy During Housing Booms and Busts (with Robert J. Hill and Miriam Steurer)
- Missing the wealthy in the HFCS: Micro problems with macro implications (with Robin Chakraborty)
- Housing Rent Dynamics and Rent Regulation in St. Petersburg (1880–1917) (with Konstantin Kholodilin and Leonid E. Limonov)
Current Projects
- Multidimensional Wealth Inequality: A Hybrid Approach toward Distributional National Accounts in Europe
- Tracking Owners’ Sentiments: Subjective Home Values, Expectations and House Price Dynamics (with Anthony Lepinteur)
- Are People Aware of their Wealth? Reliability of and Consequences from Using Self-Assessed House Prices and Hypothetical Rents Based on Joint Evidence from Survey and Experimental Data (with Francesco Fallucchi and Michael Ziegelmeyer)
- Wage Inequality, Transparency and Fairness (with Linda Alengoz, Marco Fongoni and Jasper Hepp)
- Global Comparisons of Housing Boom-Bust-Cycles Using Micro Data on Prices and Rents (with Robert J. Hill, Ronan Lyons, Daniel P. McMillen and Chihiro Shimizu)
Selected Blog Posts
- Why you should never trust a house price index (only) (Lindau Nobel Blog, 24/Aug/2017)
- Short-Selling in Immobilienmärkten: Fluch oder Segen? (Graz Economics Blog, 14/Feb/2016)
- Stammtischmythen im Faktencheck: Sind öffentliche Schulden wählbar? (Graz Economics Blog, 3/Jan/2016)
- The best age to get married if you don’t want to get divorced in Austria (Graz Economics Blog, 18/Jul/2015)
Media Coverage
- Online payments risk personal privacy (SCOPE, an Alpbach Media Academy publication, September 2018)
- Forum Alpbach: Datenökonomie macht Menschen selbst zur Ware (Der Standard & trend, 28/August/2018, Austria)
- Hauspreise ließen Teuerung wohl höher ausfallen (Die Presse, 26/March/2018, Austria)
- Solving the owner-occupied housing puzzle (Central Banking, 27/Feb/2018, UK)
- Mehr Inflation (D’Lëtzeburger Land, 16/Feb/2018, Luxembourg)
- Immobilienpreise in der Inflationsrate abbilden (Lëtzebuerger Journal, 7/Feb/2018, Luxembourg)
- So wollen Top-Ökonomen die Welt verbessern (Die Welt, 23/Aug/2017, Germany)
- 96.000 Euro für Grazer Jungforscher (Der Standard, 19/Nov/2014, Austria)
- Mit vielen Zahlen zum Erfolg in Teheran (Kleine Zeitung, 2/Aug/2010, Austria)
Theses
- Dissertation: Modelling housing markets: Issues in economic measurement
- Master’s thesis: Standardfehler in Negativ Binomialmodellen mit zufälligen Effekten (Standard Errors in Negative Binomial Models with Random Effects)
- Bachelor’s thesis: Modellierung eines Erdwärmesystems zur Bestimmung des geeigneten Abstandes zwischen Erdkollektoren (Modeling a Heat Pump System to Determine the Appropriate Separation between Collectors in the Earth)
Contact
Email:
sofie.waltl@wu.ac.at or sofie.waltl@liser.lu
LISER
Maison des Sciences Humaines
11, Porte des Sciences
4366 Esch-sur-Alzette/Belval
Luxembourg
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Department of Economics
Welthandelsplatz 1 / D4, 2.OG
1020 Wien
Austria
