Johannes Stroebel is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University in 2012, where he held the Bradley and Kohlhagen Fellowships at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Prior to attending Stanford he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Merton College, Oxford, and won the Hicks and Webb Medley Prize for the best performance in Economics. Stroebel is a member of the Working Group on Economic Policy at the Hoover Institution. In the past he has worked for Deutsche Bank and Merck KGaA.
Stroebel conducts research in Macroeconomics, Finance and Real Estate Economics. His recent research focuses on the residential housing market, in particular on understanding the role of asymmetric information in determining market outcomes. He has also analyzed the impact of government interventions in the housing market through the fiscal code, and has evaluated government responses to the recent financial and housing crisis. Stroebel also works on determining the optimal taxation of natural resource extraction projects when governments are unable to credibly commit to future tax terms.
Selected Publications
"The Impact of Asymmetric Information about Collateral Values in Mortgage Lending" (Working Paper 2012).
With Max Floetotto, "Government Intervention in the Housing Market – Who Wins, Who Loses?" (Working Paper 2011).
With Arthur van Benthem, "Resource Extraction Contracts Under Threat of Expropriation: Theory and Evidence," Revised and Resubmitted, Review of Economics and Statistics (2012).
With John B. Taylor, "Estimated Impact of the Fed's Mortgage-Backed Securities Purchase Program," International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 8(2) (June 2012).
New: The Power of the Church - The Role of Roman Catholic Teaching in the Transmission of HIV
Date Posted: Mar 14, 2012
We use the appointment of a Kenyan Roman Catholic archbishop as a natural experiment to analyze the impact of church authorities' teaching on sexual behavior. Using a triple-difference approach, we find that following the archbishop's counter-doctrinal assertion that condom use within a marriage can be acceptable to reduce HIV infections, Catholic married couples within the archdiocese who had access to condoms were 7.0 percentage points more likely to use condoms than unmarried Catholics in the
New: The Impact of Asymmetric Information About Collateral Values in Mortgage Lending
Date Posted: Mar 08, 2012
I empirically analyze the sources and magnitude of asymmetric information between competing lenders in residential mortgage lending. I exploit that property developers often cooperate with vertically integrated mortgage lenders to provide financing to buyers of their newly constructed homes. These integrated lenders might have superior information about both mortgage collateral quality and borrower characteristics. I construct a dataset of all housing transactions and associated mortgages in Ari
REVISION: Resource Extraction Contracts Under Threat of Expropriation: Theory and Evidence
Date Posted: Sep 07, 2011
We use unique data on 2,466 oil extraction agreements in 38 countries to study contracts between resource-rich countries and independent oil companies. We analyze why expropriations occur and what determines the degree of oil price exposure of host countries. With asymmetric information about a country's expropriation cost even optimal contracts feature expropriations. Near-linearity in the oil price of real-world hydrocarbon contracts also helps to explain expropriations. We show theoretically
New: Government Intervention in the Housing Market: Who Wins, Who Loses?
Date Posted: Aug 22, 2011
We study the effects of government intervention in the housing market on prices, quantities and welfare in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents. We consider (i) the introduction of temporary home purchase tax credits and (ii) a removal of the asymmetric tax treatment of owner-occupied and rental housing. Home buyer tax credits temporarily raise house prices and transaction volumes, but have negative welfare effects. Removing the asymmetric tax treatment of owner-occupied and ren
New: Potential Effects of Basel II on the Transmission from Currency Crises to Banking Crises – The Case
Date Posted: Jan 07, 2011
In this paper we evaluate potential effects of the Basel II accord on preventing the transmission from currency crises to banking crises by analyzing the South Korean crisis of 1997. We show that regulatory capital reserves under Basel II would have been lower than those under Basel I, and that therefore Basel II would have had adverse effects on the development of the crisis. Furthermore we investigate whether the behavior of rating agencies has changed since the East Asian crisis. We find no