Sebastian Kohl

Sebastian Kohl is a sociologist specialising in the political economy of housing and the comparative history of financial institutions. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin (JFK Institute), where he conducts research on the housing and insurance sectors from a historical and comparative perspective.

His academic career has taken him to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne as a senior researcher, then as a Kennedy Fellow at the Centre for European Studies at Harvard, and to the Department of Sociology and the IBF at Uppsala.

His work has been published in leading journals such as Urban Studies, Review of International Political Economy, Journal of Finance and Socio-Economic Review. He is the author of Homeownership, Renting, and Society (Routledge, 2017), a landmark study on housing policy.

The project

Title: Insuring modern societies: A historical-comparative sociology of private insurance, its evolution, origins and consequences

"This project proposes a historical-comparative sociology of the private insurance sector in its life and non-life branches (property, transport, etc.) in 20 old OECD countries starting in the late 19th century and 15 emerging economies with shorter coverage (Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe). The insurance sector annually collects about 7% of world GDP as premium income, holds about half of total banking assets and becomes increasingly important in times of rising climate and catastrophe risks, but has strangely been neglected by either historians and economists of finance with their focus on banks and capital markets or political scientists with their strong focus on public insurances within the welfare states. Sociologists themselves have covered "risk sociology" very well, but largely ignored the insurance sector therein. This project aims at filling this gap by building a cross-country historical database of the main stock and flow variables of modern premium-based insurances in order to study their evolution across time and countries, to explain their growth and to investigate selected consequences in three working packages. The first working package will build the insurance database and describe the about 200 years of modern insurance development and will compare its growth trends with those of other financial institutions and the public welfare state."

Hosting Institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Paris School of Economics (PSE)

Selective Bibliography

• Amaral, F., Dohmen, M., Kohl, S., & Schularick, M. (2025). Superstar returns? Spatial heterogeneity in returns to housing. The Journal of Finance.
• van der Heide, A., & Kohl, S. (2024). Private insurance, public welfare, and financial markets: Alpine and Maritime countries in comparative-historical perspective. Politics & Society, 52(2), 268-303.
• Kohl, S., & Römer, M. (2025). Insurance demand: a historical long-run perspective (1850–2020). The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance-Issues and Practice, 50, 595-618.
• Kholodilin, K. A., Kohl, S., & Müller, F. (2024). The rise and fall of social housing? Housing decommodification in long-run comparison. Journal of Social Policy, 53(4), 970-996.
• Kohl, Sebastian. "The political economy of homeownership: a comparative analysis of homeownership ideology through party manifestos." Socio-Economic Review 18.4 (2020): 913-940.