Publications
“Housing Wealth Beyond Prices: Individual Portfolios, Distant Assets, and Transfers in France 2011–2022” (with J-S. Ay, J. Le Gallo and O. Dupré)
Housing wealth extends beyond the main residence, encompassing all real estate assets owned by households. Using a new dataset covering all French homeowners and all housing properties each year between 2011 and 2022, we provide the first dynamic nationwide analysis of housing wealth. Our results show that the values of main residences explain most housing wealth differences between cities, while the values of additional properties amplify differences within cities. Moreover, distant ownership reduces inequalities generated from housing price variations, and inheritances and gifts strongly contribute to wealth concentration. Overall, the geography of housing wealth differs substantially from the geography of housing prices. It is therefore central to consider entire property portfolios to study housing wealth.
“Évolution de la structure de la propriété immobilière en France” (with L. Casanova-Enault, A. Peris and M. Bocquet)
Revue d’Économie Régionale et Urbaine (2024)
Despite a spatially differentiated increase in property values in France since the beginning of the 21st century, the spatial dimension of the distribution of housing wealth remains understudied. The lack of empirical work is partly due to the absence of individual data, which is also available in a small number of countries in Scandinavia, for example. To overcome this problem, we correct a structural error in the French property files used to measure housing wealth. We assess the quality of potential ID according to type I and type II errors. Our selected ID slightly introduce type I error, whereas significantly reduce type II error. Using this correction, we document the specialisation of the local ownership structure as a function of the observed price level. The proportion of dwellings owned by single owners (owners of a single dwelling) false significantly in the most expensive markets. In addition, the dynamics of ownership have changed over the last 10 years, with SCIs and legal entities gaining ground in the most expensive markets, to the detriment of single owners and multiple owners in their own right.
Working papers
“Keeping It in the Family: Inheritance Taxation and Housing-Market Turnover” (with B. Planterose)
Inheritance tax systems often reward families for holding assets rather than selling them. How does this dynastic retention affect other households’ opportunities to buy a home? We study French life estates, which, like some U.S. trusts, offer inheritance-tax savings at the cost of reduced flexibility over future sales. A simple model shows how these incentives can lead families to retain assets they would otherwise sell. To measure the consequences for housing markets, we link property, sales, and death records to reconstruct the universe of homeownership changes in France over 2011–2021. Using an event-study design that combines an age-based tax notch with affected cohorts’ initial housing shares across neighborhoods, we show that tax-induced life-estate adoption reduces total local sales. Non-homeowners account for 76% of the decline despite representing 52% of baseline purchases, while buyers under 35 account for 53% against a baseline share of 39%. We then follow life-estate homes after parental death to assess whether later sales offset the initial decline. Their cumulative resale probabilities converge to those of ordinary bequests within five years, with little evidence of a compensating surge. Combining our findings with population projections in a dynamic accounting exercise, we project that removing life estates could increase cumulative sales by 3.5% through 2050. Our results imply that inheritance-tax avoidance has real economic costs beyond forgone revenue, as incentives to retain housing within families can limit other households’ opportunities to become homeowners.
“Return on investment in supporting homeownership: Evidence from French interest-free loan policy” (with J-S. Ay and J. Le Gallo)
Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Regional Science [Updated February 2026]
This article estimates the impact of subsidized loans for first-time homeownership on the number of new homeowners (extensive margin), housing choices (intensive margin), and housing prices (capitalization effect). Our identification strategy relies on the spatial and temporal variations of the French interest-free loan policy over the last decade, controlling for confounding treatment assignment through spatial semi-parametric propensity scores. Our doubly robust estimates cannot rule out that the policy has no effect at the extensive margin, while it has significant intensive margin and capitalization effects. For a wide range of social values for the extensive and intensive margins, we compute the returns to government spending according to counterfactual policy schemes and credit market conditions. Our simulations suggest that for reasonable social values, increasing public spending has a return on investment lower than one, and may even be negative in some situations.
Selected work in progress
“Portfolio Allocation and Housing Markets” (with S. Le Guern Herry)
We study whether higher taxes on housing relative to financial assets for wealthy households can improve housing affordability for the rest of the population. We exploit the 2017 French wealth tax reform, which transformed the comprehensive wealth tax into a real-estate tax and sharply deteriorated the after-tax return to housing relative to financial assets at the top. Using cadastral data, we construct a measure of local exposure to the reform and show that wealthy owners increased housing sales significantly more in highly exposed areas, while non-wealthy owners did not respond. We then examine local redistribution effects and find that, in the most exposed areas, post-reform transactions increasingly involve buyers who are less wealthy than the sellers, alongside a rise in first-time buyers. Finally, portfolio responses occur only for properties benefiting from capital gains tax rebates, suggesting an interaction with capital gains taxation. Our findings indicate that fiscal policies affecting portfolio incentives at the top can influence local housing market dynamics.
“Unveiling Hidden Wealth: The Impact of Beneficial Ownership Regulation on Real Estate Transparency” (with S. Frachot)
We examine the effectiveness of beneficial ownership (BO) regulation in combating illicit financial flows in the real estate sector, utilizing French property data and the BO register. Key findings reveal: (1) significant hidden wealth, especially among the ultra-wealthy; (2) increasing ownership complexity with wealth, undermining transparency; (3) offshore ownership concentrated in high-end and touristic markets; and (4) discrepancies between declared and actual ownership. Leveraging the 2022 CJEU decision to restrict BO register access as a natural experiment, we find opaque companies rapidly updated their status, unlike transparent ones. These results highlight the importance of regulatory design in addressing financial opacity and balancing transparency with privacy.
“Gender Bias in Voter Mobilization” (with J. Ducept)
We estimate the gender penalty faced by women candidates in elections. We exploit the synchronization of French national elections in a difference-in-differences design that overcomes two common identification challenges in the literature: variation in party preferences of voters and strategic allocation of women candidates. 2012 presidential runoffs reveal local partisan preferences in gender-neutral contests, while the subsequent parliamentary races allow us to estimate party-specific gender penalties. Relative to a race between two men, a right-wing woman facing a left-wing man loses 5.3 margin points, against 2.5 for a left-wing woman. We trace these gaps to an asymmetric mobilization channel: the aligned electorate under-mobilizes when their candidate is a woman, while only right-wing voters over-mobilize against an opposing woman. A cross-sectional decomposition attributes part of the penalty to the gender gap in campaign funding, which stems primarily from private donors giving less to women, leaving a residual consistent with biased voter preferences.