PLACE · RISK · TECHNOLOGY
My research examines how place, risk, and technology shape real asset markets. I begin from a simple premise: place is not a passive backdrop for economic activity. It organizes how information travels, where risks are concentrated, how capital is allocated, and where new technologies alter the demand for space. My current agenda therefore connects climate risk, artificial intelligence, overlapping real asset networks, and the changing use of offices and other commercial properties. Rather than treating these topics as separate market episodes, I study how localized exposures are reflected in the decisions and outcomes of firms, investors, tenants, insurers, and asset markets.
Real estate provides an especially useful empirical setting because physical assets are fixed in place while their owners, users, and sources of financing operate through broader networks. This tension allows me to connect local conditions to corporate decisions and capital-market outcomes. Across these projects, I move between property, firm, and market outcomes while matching the strength of each claim to the underlying research design.
How do location and overlapping real asset networks shape information advantages, asset prices, and corporate investment and financing?
I first study the connections created by firms’ physical footprints. Overlapping Real Asset Networks and Corporate Investment examines how overlapping corporate real asset networks relate to investment and debt issuance, including a collateral channel tied to corporate real estate holdings. Granular Risks and Stock Returns uses a geographic instrumental variable to identify how idiosyncratic shocks in local property markets are capitalized into listed commercial real estate returns.
This line of work builds on The Geography of Real Property Information and Investment, which shows that institutional investors use location-based information advantages when allocating to REITs and that this strategy is associated with superior performance. Together, these projects connect the geography of information to asset prices and then to the investment and financing choices of firms linked through real asset markets.
How are climate, health, and disaster-related risks reflected in insurance costs, property-market outcomes, and investment in the built environment?
A second strand asks how emerging risks are absorbed by properties and the institutions around them. Climate Risk and Commercial Property Insurance analyzes insurance costs across major U.S. commercial real estate sectors, their responses to expected and realized climate risk, and the incidence of higher premiums. The Rise of Healthy Buildings documents a post-pandemic shift toward health-oriented commercial buildings and links healthy-building exposure to investment, performance, and mobility.
Earlier work establishes the market context for these questions. Climate Change and Commercial Property Markets shows that the capital-market effects of local climate hazards vary with attention to climate change, producing a mismatch between physical hazards and market responses. A First Look at the Impact of COVID-19 on Commercial Real Estate Prices examines how local pandemic exposure, policy interventions, and reopenings were reflected in commercial real estate firms’ stock returns.
How do generative AI and remote and hybrid work reshape demand for commercial space and the outcomes of real asset firms?
My third theme studies how changes in work and production reshape the demand for commercial space. The Disruption of Generative AI in Real Asset Markets examines how exposure to generative AI is related to tenant rents, listed real estate valuations, analyst forecasts, and operating performance, with labor substitution and reallocation providing the paper’s organizing channels.
Office Leasing Resilience in the Remote and Hybrid Era asks whether sustainable building attributes and vibrant urban locations support leasing resilience in a mature remote- and hybrid-work market. Together, these projects examine two related transformations: technology can alter firms’ uses of labor and space, while building quality and location may help determine which offices remain attractive as workplace practices change.
My next projects extend this agenda across technology, disaster risk, and contracting institutions. Disrupted Spaces: How Automation and Artificial Intelligence Reshape Corporate Real Estate studies how firms’ exposure to automation and artificial intelligence is associated with changes in their corporate real estate footprints. Sharing the Disaster Risk: Evidence from the Commercial Real Estate Market investigates how disaster risk is shared and priced in commercial real estate markets. Recovery Rights, Court Efficiency, and Corporate Lease Pricing examines how congestion in bankruptcy courts may affect the pricing of corporate leases.
Together, these projects continue my broader effort to understand how place-specific exposures interact with firm decisions, contractual arrangements, and capital markets, while preserving a clear distinction between documented relationships and causal evidence.
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