That's me

Fabian Greimel

Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Vienna

Curriculum Vitae

Research Fields

Distributional Macroeconomics · Macro-Finance · Household Finance · Computational Economics

News

Research Projects

Falling Behind: Has Rising Inequality Fueled the American Debt Boom? (September 2025)
with Moritz Drechsel-Grau [paper] [slides] [poster] [two-minute video] [old version with Huggett-type model]
[Abstract] This paper studies whether the interplay of social comparisons in housing and rising income inequality contributed to the household debt boom in the United States between 1980 and 2007. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with general social comparisons in housing to show that changes in the distribution of income affect aggregate housing demand, aggregate debt, and house prices if (and only if) social comparisons are asymmetric. In the empirically relevant case of upward-looking comparisons, rising inequality can rationalize a substantial share of the observed housing and debt boom.

Review of Financial Studies 39 (2026) 459–517
2020 WFA PhD Candidate Award for Outstanding Research
2022 Young Economist Award of the Austrian Economic Association

Shared Borrowers, Shared Stress: The Credit-Line Channel of Contagion (January 2026)
with Carlos A. Ramírez [draft coming soon]
[Abstract] We introduce a novel channel through which shocks propagate in financial networks: banks are connected if they have revolving credit lines with a common industry. When a distressed bank cuts down credit, firms in that industry will compensate this liquidity loss by drawing more heavily on their other credit lines, creating additional liquidity outflows for all other banks serving this industry. Using regulatory loan-level corporate credit data from the Federal Reserve, we construct a bank-by-bank _spillover matrix_ and measure each institution’s _systemicness_ and _vulnerability_ at a quarterly frequency. The credit-line channel is quantitatively important and economically meaningful: shocks to large banks generate substantial liquidity outflows for other institutions—large enough to push several banks close to regulatory liquidity constraints. Because the construction relies on credit-line exposures that regulators observe at high frequency-rather than market prices—our approach provides a structural, operational tool for evaluating the systemic consequences of bank distress.


Understanding Housing Wealth Effects: Debt, Homeownership and the Lifecycle (June 2020)
with Frederick Zadow [paper] [slides]
[Abstract] Housing wealth effects---the reaction of consumption to changes in house prices---were at the heart of the Great Recession. Empirical and quantitative macroeconomic studies have found that housing wealth effects are stronger for more indebted households. One important policy implication is that lowering debt limits for borrowers will dampen the consumption slump in a house price bust. Such conclusions might be premature. We build a simple life-cycle model with housing with closed form solutions for housing wealth effects. We show that the strength of housing wealth effects crucially depends on the underlying household characteristics which also determine the debt levels. In this framework imposing one-size-fits-all debt limits does not necessarily mitigate housing wealth effects. To be effective, policies have to be tailored to borrowers' characteristics. Aggregate housing wealth effects can be reduced in three ways: (i) if old homeowners reduce their housing wealth; (ii) if the home ownership rate decreases; (iii) if agents have smaller houses. We provide a simple empirical test of our model predictions. When explaining housing wealth effects, we find that the level of mortgages turns statistically insignificant once relevant household characteristics (age and a proxy for housing preferences) are added.

Talks and Discussions

2023: TU Vienna · Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena in Amsterdam · KVS New Paper Sessions in Den Haag (invited session, cancelled) · Austrian Economic Association in Salzburg

2022: T2M Conference in London · Behavioral Macroeconomics Workshop in Bamberg · Austrian Economic Association in Vienna · Tilburg University · Workshop on Redistributive Trends in Amsterdam (Co-Organizer) · 4th Winter Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association in Vienna

2021: University of Vienna

2020: AEA in San Diego (Poster) · AFA in San Diego (Poster) · University of Amsterdam · University of Bologna · virtual meeting of the Western Finance Association

2019: Mannheim-Frankfurt Macro Workshop · Stockholm University · Nordic Macro Symposium in Smögen (Discussant) · Econometric Society European Meeting in Manchester · New Approaches for Understanding Business Cycles (CEPR, Mannheim, Poster) · European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society in Rotterdam

2018: Financial Markets and Macroeconomic Performance (CEPR, Frankfurt, Poster) · CEPR European Summer Symposium in Financial Markets in Gerzensee (evening sessions) · Econometric Society European Meeting in Cologne · 2nd Winter Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association in Vienna

Academic Positions

Education

Contact

University of Vienna
Department of Economics
Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1
1090 Wien
Austria

email: fabian.greimel@univie.ac.at

© Fabian Greimel. Last modified: January 28, 2026. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.