2nd MIT Climate and Real Estate Symposium
Call for Papers - Submission Deadline May 24, 2024

Climate change poses an urgent threat to the real estate sector. On the one hand, the real estate industry is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, with embodied and operational carbon accounting for more than one-third of total carbon emissions. On the other hand, the impacts of acute and chronic physical climate risks — flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme weather — are becoming increasingly salient. Action across all areas of the real estate sector will be required to limit the social and economic consequences of climate change.

Building on the success of our inaugural symposium, the MIT Center for Real Estate invites submissions of the latest research at the intersection of climate change and real estate for the second MIT Climate and Real Estate Symposium, scheduled for October 4 (Friday) to October 5 (Saturday), 2024.

Call for Papers

We are calling for papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Quantifying how physical or transition climate risk impacts real estate markets.
• Assessing the eMects of varying climate adaptation and resilience strategies in the real estate sector.
• Evaluating measures to decarbonize the real estate sector.

We seek novel research papers with rigorous theoretical and/or empirical analyses that advance our understanding of the role of economics, policy, finance, and behavioral science within these topics. We especially welcome submissions by early-career scholars and from scholars who are under-represented in economics.

Keynote Speakers

• Joe Aldy (Harvard University)
• Matthew Kahn (University of Southern California)
• Christopher Knittel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Johannes Stroebel (New York University)

Event Logistics

Time: October 4 (Friday) – October 5 (Saturday), 2024.

The event will run for 1.5 days (approximately from Friday 9 am to Saturday 2 pm).

Location: MIT Campus (Cambridge, MA).

Invited speakers and presenters are expected to participate in the entire 2-day symposium. There is no registration fee. We will cover two nights of accommodation for speakers traveling to the Greater Boston area.

Submission Guidelines

Submission Deadline: May 24, 2024

Submission Portal: https://forms.gle/KNC1yaK73ahPsd1f9

Submissions may include completed research papers or extended abstracts discussing the results and conclusions. Notification of acceptance will be communicated by the end of June.

Organizers

• Yichun Fan (PhD Candidate, MIT Center for Real Estate)
• Bram van der Kroft (Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT Center for Real Estate and MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium)
• Juan Palacios (Visiting Assistant Professor and Director of the Climate and Real Estate Initiative, MIT Center for Real Estate)
• Siqi Zheng (Faculty Director of MIT Center for Real Estate and STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability)

Event Manager: Panita Rosenberg (Senior Administrative Assistant, MIT Center for Real Estate)

Please get in touch with [email protected] with any questions regarding the symposium. This call is not exclusive and can be shared with others.