Yurou He

2026–27 Job Market Candidate | Applied Economics and Management | Cornell Univeristy

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 real estate economics. I study land reallocation, land-use change, and housing market adjustment, with a focus on how these processes are shaped by market frictions and environmental change. Specifically, I study how market frictions and institutions shape land reallocation, and how land and housing markets respond to environmental change, including natural disasters.

I combine microeconomic and network theory, causal inference, and large-scale individual- and parcel-level data to identify underlying economic mechanisms and evaluate their policy implications.

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Job Market Paper

Land Assembly: Outsider Bargaining with a Network

Abstract: Assembling complementary assets from multiple owners is common in economic activities but often leads to severe holdout problems. This paper uses land assembly as a concrete context to study how asset networks and bargaining order affect assembly success and surplus division. I develop a sequential bargaining model on a land parcel network and introduce pivotality and assembly centrality to characterize bargaining positions of landowners. The model predicts that pivotal owners can extract significant surplus; acquisition order also matters: purchasing peripheral parcels first can improve bargaining positions of remaining central owners by reducing alternative assembly options. Using over 570,000 parcel transactions in U.S. land assembly projects from 2007--2022, I find that an additional pivotal parcel nearly doubles the average parcel price of an assembly project; more central parcels sell for higher prices when purchased later in the sequence. The price effect of pivotality is greater in states with stronger restrictions on eminent domain.

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