Housing Markets, Macrofinance, Urban Economics

Since September 2018, Francisco Amaral has been a PhD student at the Bonn Graduate School of Economics at the University of Bonn. Francisco’s research focuses on housing markets, specifically on the drivers of housing prices and returns. He is interested in the spatial distribution of housing markets and how it affects economic growth and financial stability.

What is the best thing about your job?

I get to choose my own research topics, and that’s something I value a lot, especially when I compare my job as a PhD student with the jobs of friends who work in the private sector. I feel there is a lot more freedom as a PhD student.

What fascinates you about your research topic?

The housing market is fascinating because it’s important to every single one of us: We either rent or own homes, we are all affected by how housing policies succeed or fail and exposed to people trying to invest in housing markets and driving up prices. It’s a market that converges a lot of different sectors of society. And at the end of the day, we all need somewhere to sleep and live.

If you had not gone into research, what would you be doing today?

My guess is that I would be working in the private sector as a consultant, trying to apply some of the knowledge I gained in my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

When was the last time you had to change your mind?

When I was working on a paper with another PhD student and my supervisor, we got some empirical results that went in the opposite direction of what we’d expected. At first, we thought there was some kind of mistake in the way we were doing the empirical analysis. But it turned out that the results were correct. This made us think about how we were wrong before and how we could come up with an explanation for the new result.

Which advice would you have needed yourself as a doctoral student?

The freedom that comes with doing a PhD also means that a lot of the time you’re doing research, you’re doing it on your own. Sometimes it can be a bit complicated and I’ve had those experiences where you feel like you’re at a dead end. But it’s important to understand that this is normal and part of the job. Fortunately, especially in Bonn, there’s always the possibility to talk to other PhD students and there’s a very nice research community that can help you in such situations.