If you wonder about the pronunciation: [Yesper(-day) Bɜ-yɛ-reed]
I am a postdoc at Stockholm University, Department of Economics, doing research in applied macroeconomics, using administrative household data, methods from applied microeconomics, and structural modeling to study the role of home prices and credit use in household finance, migration, and the macroeconomy.
Contact: jesper hw bojeryd at gmail dot com
I am really looking forward to returning to Stockholm and work closer to other macroeconomists interested in household finance.
Why do workers stay in places in economic decline? This paper presents a housing wealth channel where declining housing wealth reduces the out-migration incentives of homeowners following a negative regional shock. I combine Norwegian administrative data with a life-cycle model that includes location, housing, and savings decisions. I exploit the 2014–2016 oil price plunge episode which reduced regional earnings and home prices significantly and permanently in the oil-exporting region of Stavanger and I empirically document the heterogeneous changes in moving behavior across housing tenures and wealth. I find increased out-migration among renters and low housing-wealth homeowners and observe decreased out-migration for high housing-wealth homeowners. The richness of the data allows me to control for potentially confounding factors. The model, consistent with the data, shows that the erosion of housing wealth reduces homeowners’ out-migration motives by lowering the value of other locations with better opportunities and the effect increases with housing wealth. These results highlight the importance of general equilibrium effects to understand the heterogeneity in migration responses and that low migration is driven by accompanying wealth shocks. Policies like moving subsidies benefit mobile renters and can amplify the housing wealth effect on less mobile homeowners, further reducing the out-migration incentive.