Alex Anas

Alex Anas is professor of economics at the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1991. Prior to joining the faculty at Buffalo, Dr. Anas was on the faculty at Northwestern University from 1975 to 1991 and had visting appointments at Stanford University in 1981-82 and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986-88. Dr. Anas obtained his BA and BS from Carnegie Mellon University in 1972, and his MA, MCP in 1974 and Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006 Dr. Anas was inducted as a fellow of the Regional Science Association International and in 2016 he was presented with the Walter Isard Award in recognition of his scholarly achievements in the field of Regional Science. Dr. Anas' research interests over the years have spanned theoretical, empirical and applied urban economics. His publications have contributed to understanding dynamic land use adjustment with durable housing and the abandonment of housing in central cities, the effects of transportation including public transportation on property values and urban land use, the effects of traffic congestion and congestion pricing on land use, dynamic housing market models, the effects of regulations on the housing market, models with dispersed jobs and residences, theories of systems of cities with intercity trade, urban agglomeration, ethnic segregation and ghettos, and the beneficial effects of urban sprawl.

A continuing programmatic focus of Dr. Anas' research career has been the development of computable models based on microeconomic theory that can be used to empirically analyze the impacts of changes and policies on urban structure. In the 1980s he developed and applied the CATLAS (Chicago Transportation and Land Use Analysis System) with a research award from the United States Department of Transportation. In the early 1990s, Dr. Anas developed the CPHMM (Chicago Prototype Housing Market Model), a dynamic model of real estate stock adjustment. The research was supported by awards from the Fannie Mae Foundation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

More recently, at Buffalo, Dr. Anas completed development of RELU-TRAN (Regional Economy, Land Use and Transportation), a computable general equilibrium model that treats the interconnections of spatially disaggregated labor markets, the markets for housing and non-housing floor space, industry location, real estate development, work and non-work related personal transportation and energy utilization and CO2 emissions in personal transportation. The development of RELU-TRAN was supported by major research awards from the National Science Foundation and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. While these awards helped apply the model to the analysis of congestion, road pricing and urban sprawl in Chicago, a 2010 research award from the University of California supported a more extensive application to Los Angeles. The model has also been applied to Paris, France with the support of the Societe du Grand Paris.