Mark Toth

About me

Papers

Households are spatially exposed to each other by living in urban agglomerations, generating residential externalities which distort housing demand. In the short run, the spatial structure of a city is constant and determines the potential strength of these externalities. I embed city structure and residential externalities into a monetary business cycle model of a city within a currency area. A more concentrated city structure generates stronger distortions in housing demand, which transmits into dampened consumption responses to monetary policy shocks. Monetary policy is therefore less effective in more concentrated cities - more generally, in regions in which cities are more concentrated. Using geospatial data based on satellite imagery, I empirically verify this theoretical finding for the United States and the euro area.

This paper examines the relationship between location, liquidity, and prices in housing markets. We construct spatial datasets for German and U.S. cities and show that liquidity and prices decline with distance to the city center. We build and estimate a spatial housing search model and demonstrate that  travel costs determine the spatial distribution of liquidity and prices. In a counterfactual analysis, we find that frictional illiquidity reduces prices in the outskirts by 7% relative to the center and explains 19% of the spatial price differences. Our findings highlight the importance of demand-side preferences for asset pricing.

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