The result is consistent with the intuition that people tend to have a higher stress level due to the loss of home equity and this loss of home equity also increases the possibility of foreclosure, which is occurring in states with large house price declines, and thus increases homeowners' debt stress.

In light of potential consequences for inequality and housing affordability, this thesis delivers a comprehensive contribution to several fields of studies related to regional housing markets. It comprises three scientific articles, which contribute to understanding the regional heterogeneity in housing markets, its origin as well as its implications. The first article deals with the evolutionary process of city size distributions, in particular the evolution of Zipf's law, and its implications for (sub-)urbanization processes. In he second article, the convergence process of regional housing markets and characteristics of house price convergence clubs are investigated. The third article assesses the role of regional housing markets in the transmission of monetary policy to economic activity and presents implications for regional inequality.

This thesis investigates heterogeneous topics since it is related to both housing economics and monetary economics, and uses various tools including theoretical modeling, microeconomic policy evaluation and macroeconomic empirical approach. It is constituted of three chapters. The first one, co-authored with Eric Monnet, is interested in the relationship between demographic changes within countries and housing investment. The second one, co-authored with Guillaume Chapelle and Benjamin Vignolles, assesses the impact of a housing tax credit on several dimensions of the housing market. Finally, the third one studies how monetary policy should react to capital inflows when there are frictions on the financial market.