Assist. Prof. Max Löffler

Housing Booms and Residential Segregation

During his visit at CES, Max Löffler will work with his coauthors on a study on housing booms and residential segregation. Cities around the world have experienced tremendous housing booms. However, incomes did not keep up with rising prices. Ample media coverage highlights the displacement of long-term residents out of their neighborhoods. There exists little systematic evidence on the consequences of house price booms and their impact on income inequality and socio-economic segregation of cities. Together with Moritz Drechsel-Grau (LMU) and Katrin Hohmeyer (IAB), Mr. Löffler aims to provide a causal answer to the question whether housing booms lead to the displacement of low-income households.

Mr. Löffler’s is a public finance economist interested in inequality and public policy. In his current work, he studies the welfare effects of residential property taxes in Germany, evaluates the distribution impact of recent reforms in the Dutch real-estate transaction tax, and analyzes the fiscal and economic effects of a large-scale local austerity program.

Max Löffler is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Microeconomics and Public Economics at Maastricht University. He earned his PhD from the University of Cologne in 2018. Mr. Löffler recently received a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council NWO to analyze the interplay between housing markets, inequality, and public policy. He is also a team member of the ERC project “Housing, Inequality and Public Policies” at the University of Cologne.”