Sapere Aude Starting Grant to Kathrin Schlafmann, Department of Finance

Housing prices in Denmark have increased by more than 18% within the last two years. At the same time, Danish households have the highest debt-to-ratio income in the OECD. While this development causes concerns about the stability of the housing market, there is no consensus between economists and decision makers about the appropriate policy response. 

Sapere Aude Grant is a stepping stone in building an international hub for housing market research
 

It is crucial that policy makers can rely on well-founded academic research when making decisions about the need for regulation in the housing market. The problem is, however, that academic research lags behind the development of the housing market and provides only limited guidance for the political decision-making process.

With the Sapere Aude Grant, Kathrin Schlafmann aims to gather a group of international researchers, PhD students and world-leading experts in the field and build an international hub for housing market research.

The project will combine empirical analyses of the effects of past developments in the housing market with theoretical modelling. Both of these methods have their strengths and their challenges, which limits how informative each can be individually in guiding policy makers. Combining these two separate lines of research will allow overcoming these limitations and evaluating which forces drive house prices, and how regulation of housing and mortgage markets will affect house prices, the indebtedness of households, and the stability of the economy.

The Sapere Aude Grant gives younger researchers at the top of their field, the opportunity to develop and strengthen their own research ideas and start their own research groups in order to carry out a research project at a high international level. 

For this project, the Independent Research Fund Denmark has awarded Kathrin Schlafmann the Sapere Aude grant of DKK 6,181,632.