Events and Seminars

The CERGE-EI Festival is a community event that brings together faculty, alumni, and students to show prospective students from diverse backgrounds what an education in economics can empower them to achieve. Economic research is not just about theory and models — it’s a powerful toolkit for understanding human behavior, shaping public policy, improving markets, and addressing complex global challenges.

Whether you study Economics, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, Finance, or the Social Sciences — if you’re curious about the world and its challenges, this day is for you. Discover why an economics education matters, connect with our vibrant alumni network, and explore how studying at CERGE-EI could be your next big step. The Festival is also an opportunity for CERGE-EI alumni to reconnect, share their experiences, and contribute to the institute’s ongoing development and future growth.

Find detailed program here.

Georgi Kocharkov, Ph.D.

European Central Bank

Authors: Leo Kaas, Georgi Kocharkov and Nicolas Syrichas

Abstract: We examine the evolution of spatial house price dispersion during Germany’s recent housing boom. Using a dataset of sales listings, we find that house price dispersion has significantly increased, which is driven entirely by rising price variation across postal codes. We show that both price divergence across labor market regions and widening spatial price variation within these regions are important factors for this trend. We propose and calibrate a directed search model of the housing market to understand the driving forces of rising spatial price dispersion, highlighting the role of housing supply, housing demand and frictions in the matching process between buyers and sellers. While shifts in housing supply, housing demand and search frictions all matter for overall price increases and for regional price differences, we find that variation in housing demand is the primary factor contributing to the widening spatial dispersion. Our model-based demand and supply components correlate strongly with regional fundamentals, suggesting that they capture economically meaningful variation in local housing markets.