Nina Furbach - Research

Working Papers

The role of securitisation in enhancing EU credit supply

Securitisation activity in Europe has dropped sharply since the 2008-2009 financial crisis and remains well below pre-crisis levels. Yet, securitisation has gained importance in the public discourse, seen as an essential tool to support the massive financing needs that the European Union is facing. This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of securitisation in enhancing bank lending. Exploiting a two-way fixed effects regression approach on disaggregated loan data from 2020 to 2024, I find no significant effect of securitisation on credit supply. Banks more engaged in securitisation activity tend to lend higher amounts to the same firms, but this relationship is driven by structural characteristics, such as larger bank size, rather than by differences in securitisation activity

The Demand Side of Rising Housing Costs

Earlier title: The vicious circle of spatial skill sorting and increasing housing costs

latest version (submitted), ECB Working Paper

What drives rising housing costs in large cities? This paper shows that fundamental demand forces alone can explain a substantial share of recent house price increases, even in the absence of regional differences in housing supply elasticities. I exploit the national increase in the relative supply of university graduates as an exogenous demand shock and estimate its effects in a quantitative spatial model. I find that an important channel through which the demand shock affects house prices arises due to the non-homotheticity of preferences: low-income individuals spend a higher share of their income on housing, making them more sensitive to increases in housing costs. The rising skill share has therefore led high-school graduates to avoid increasingly expensive cities relative to university graduates. The increase in sorting, in turn, drove up housing demand and housing costs in large cities compared to rural areas.

Publications

Demographics, Labor Market Power and the Spatial Equilibrium

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics (forthcoming), latest version, ECB Working Paper

This paper studies how demographics affect aggregate labor market power, the urban wage premium and the spatial concentration of population. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which labor market competitiveness depends on the demographic composition of the local workforce. Using highly disaggregated administrative data from Germany, I find that firms have more labor market power over older workers: The labor supply elasticity decreases from more than 2 to 1 from age 20 to 64. Calibrating the model with the reduced-form elasticity estimates, I find that differences in labor supply elasticities across age groups can explain 4% of the urban wage premium and 2% of the spatial concentration of population. Demographics and skill together account for 10% of the urban wage premium and 2% of agglomeration.

Policy Work

Drivers of the labour force in the euro area

joint with Agostino Consolo, António Dias da Silva and Ramon Gomez-Salvador

ECB Economic Bulletin, Issue 3, 2026

What drives employment trends among older workers?

joint with Afonso S. Moura

ECB Economic Bulletin, Issue 3, 2026

The decline in non-tariff barriers to services trade and euro area competitiveness

joint with Iván Ordoñez Martínez

VoxEU Column

Past and future challenges for the external competitiveness of the euro area

joint with Camilla Altieri, Virginia Di Nino, Michael Fidora, Vanessa Gunnella, Marta Salazar Rodríguez and Tobias Schuler

ECB Economic Bulletin, Issue 6, 2024

Will the euro area car sector recover?

joint with Roberto De Santis, Virginia Di Nino, Ulla Neumann and Pedro Neves

ECB Economic Bulletin, Issue 4, 2024