Fabian Greimel
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Vienna
Research Fields
Distributional Macroeconomics · Macro-Finance · Household Finance · Computational Economics
News
March 2025 | Falling behind got accepted at the Review of Financial Studies
December 2024 | Received the Teacher of the Year 2023/24 award of the MSc Econonometrics for my Networks course at the University of Amsterdam
September 2024 | New Job at the University of Vienna
December 2023 | Co-organizing T2M Conference in Amsterdam with Pablo Winant, Elisabeth Proehl and Christian Stoltenberg in May 2024
Research Projects
Shared Borrowers, Shared Stress: The Credit-Line Channel of Contagion (January 2026)with Carlos A. Ramírez [slides] [paper]
[Abstract]
We propose a novel channel of shock propagation in the banking system: when a distressed bank curtails credit, firms substitute by drawing more heavily on alternative credit lines, triggering liquidity outflows at other banks. Using detailed US supervisory data, we show that this channel is quantitatively significant and provides a more granular system-wide view of liquidity risk among banks.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
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
2026: Network Science in Economics in Miami · Barcelona Summer Forum
2024: Wifo Vienna · University of Vienna
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
since 2024: Assistant Professor – University of Vienna
2020-2024: Assistant Professor (tenure track) – University of Amsterdam
2021-2024: Candidate Fellow – Tinbergen Institute
Education
2015–2020: PhD in Economics – University of Mannheim
2016–2017: Visiting PhD student at Yale University
2013–2015: MSc in Economics – Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna
2010–2013: BSc in Economics – University of Economics and Business (WU), Vienna
Contact
University of Vienna
Department of Economics
Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1
1090 Wien
Austria
email: fabian.greimel@univie.ac.at