Welcome to my website. I am an economist based at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER).
My research focuses on economic measurement and macro-economic implications. I am particularly interested in the distributional and spatial dimension of economic phenomena. Eventually, my research aims to provide people with accurately measured, meaningful and comprehensive numbers to facilitate public discourse and evidence-based policy-making.
I have worked on measurement issues related to real estate economics, the dynamics in house prices, rents and price-to-rent ratios, the CPI, as well as the distribution of wealth and Distributional National Accounts.
Currently, I am interested in 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.
My CV is available here.
Here are links to my profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Google Scholar.
Research
Publications
- “Estimating Quantile-Specific Rental Yields for Residential Housing in Sydney”, Regional Science and Urban Economics 68, 2018, 204 – 225.
- Presentations: [OeNB, Vienna, October 2016] [Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge (MA), May 2016]
- “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.
- Presentations: [LISER, Luxembourg, January 2017] [ARUEA-ASSA meeting in Chicago, January 2017] [Regional Studies Association Annual Conference, U Graz, April 2016] [ISW Workshop on Empirical Economics, WIFO, Vienna, January 2016] [SEM conference at OECD, July 2015] [Workshop on Improvements in Price Index Methodology and Practice: The International Comparisons Program (ICP) and the Measurement of Movements in House Prices, U Graz, December 2014]
- “A hedonic house price index in continuous time”, International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis 9(4), 2016, 648 – 670.
- Presentations: [Austrian Economic Association conference at U Klagenfurt, June 2015] [SEM conference at U Chicago Booth, August 2014]
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)
- Working Paper: [LISER Working Paper]
- Presentations: [ESCoE Conference on Economic Measurement, Bank of England, May 2018] [STATEC, Luxembourg, April 2018] [NBER Conference on International Comparisons of Income, Prices and Production, MIT, Cambridge (MA), May 2016] [OeNB, Vienna, June 2016] [Oxford U, February 2017] [Institute of Fiscal Studies, London, May 2017] [GGDC 25th Anniversary Conference, Groningen, June 2017] [SEM conference at MIT, Cambridge (MA), July 2017]
- Media Coverage: Die Presse (AT), Central Banking (UK), D’Lëtzeburger Land (LU), Lëtzebuerger Journal (LU)
- Missing the wealthy in the HFCS: Micro problems with macro implications (with Robin Chakraborty)
- Working Paper: [ECB Working Paper]
- Presentations (partly including further insights from the ongoing project The Missing Wealth in European Wealth Statistics): [“The legacy of Tony Atkinson in inequality analysis”, LIS, Luxembourg, May 2018] [OeNB, March 2018] [Vienna University of Economics and Business, March 2018] [WID.world conference, Paris School of Economics, December 2017] [ECB HFCN User workshop, Frankfurt, November 2017] [U Graz, September 2017] [Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt, August 2017] [5th Luxembourg Workshop on Household Finance and Consumption, Banque Centrale du Luxembourg, June 2017] [Expert Group on Linking Macro and Micro Statistics for the Household Sector, ECB, Frankfurt, June 2017]
Current Projects
- 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)
- Historic Rental Prices in St. Petersburg (1880-1917): Revolutions, World War I and Rent Control (with Konstantin Kholodilin and Leonid E. Limonov)
- Presentations: [LISER, May 2018]
- 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)
- The Distribution of Wealth in Europe: A Hybrid Approach toward Distributional National Accounts
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)
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)
In the press
- 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)
Contact
Email:
sofie.waltl@gmail.com or sofie.waltl@liser.lu
LISER
Maison des Sciences Humaines
11, Porte des Sciences
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette/Belval
Luxembourg
