Yurou He

Hi! I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University. 

My research lies at the intersection of environmental, urban, and public economics. I study how land and housing markets respond to bargaining frictions, coordination frictions, and natural disasters, with implications for land-use change, economic resilience, and climate adaptation. 

I recast land assembly as a network bargaining problem, developing new theory and using highly granular parcel-level transaction data to study how ownership networks shape bargaining power, acquisition strategies, and assembly costs. These frictions are pervasive in land markets and can impede environmental policies that require contiguous land, including managed retreat, biodiversity conservation, and utility-scale solar development.

I also examine why communities experience divergent recovery paths after disasters and how coordination frictions in rebuilding generate unequal long-run redevelopment in land and housing markets, local development, and regional economic resilience.

Methodologically, I combine microeconomic and network theory, applied microeconometrics, and geospatial machine learning, using large-scale parcel-level data and satellite imagery.

I am on the 2026–27 academic job market! Please find my CV here and email me.