President's Letter | January 2023

Dear AREUEA Members,

It is my honor and pleasure to serve as your President in 2023. We have lots of exciting activities in the works.  But first, I want to highlight a few milestones from 2022.   

In June, we held a very successful in-person National Meeting, featuring 72 research papers, Susan Wachter’s Quigley Medal lecture, and an inaugural policy forum on eviction prevention. The meeting kicked off with three junior scholar panels, which linked 12 selected junior researchers to discussants/mentees.  In another new mentoring effort, we launched the pipeline scholars initiative, which brought a dozen college students and pre-docs with an interest in real estate and urban economics research (many from under-represented backgrounds) to the national conference.  They attended the junior scholar sessions, the policy forum lunch, and then a special session with Jenny Schuetz focused on her book on housing policy.  

We also held not one but two wonderful international conferences, one in Dublin in July and one in Tokyo in August.   Thank you to Jiro Yoshida, the other international committee members, and the two conference organizing committees for all their hard work.  

In addition to these in-person events, Eva Steiner led a robust virtual seminar series with 18 talks, which attracted 90 registrants on average. Thank you to Eva and her organizing committee!  And we held a virtual policy forum event on the COVID house price boom in November 2022, which drew 200 participants. 

Dan McMillen, Lu Han, and Wenlan Qian have been hard at work as editors of Real Estate Economics. Submissions rose again, to 260 papers, and despite this large number, the editors achieved an average turnaround time of just 29 days.  The two-year impact factor is up substantially from two years ago.  Given the high volume of submissions, the editors have invited a fourth editor, Eva Steiner, to join their team.   Thanks to Dan, Lu and Wenlan, and now Eva too!  Please continue to send your best work to Real Estate Economics, to cite REE articles, and to respond promptly to referee requests!

On the communication front, we continued to update our website and to share news on our twitter account. Please take a moment to follow us @AREUEA_ORG. We continued to see member growth, with 901 members as of early December.  We are starting to collect basic demographic information that we can use in aggregate to analyze our membership.  We adopted a data policy to protect how we use your membership data. 

It was nice to see many of you at the ASSA-AREUEA conference, which was organized by our First VP Xudong An.  The conference started with a terrific doctoral poster session and panel, and the three days that followed were filled with 24 paper sessions, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh’s timely and provocative presidential address, and a fantastic WREN-organized panel on industry-academia collaborations and data partnerships. (We recorded the panel and will share with members soon.) If you missed Stijn’s address, you can already read it on early view on the Real Estate Economics website!  Thanks to Xudong and the program committee for a terrific program!

We presented a number of awards at the meeting too.  We announced that this year’s Quigley Medal winner is David Geltner and this year’s Bloom Service Award recipient is Dan McMillen.  The Awards committee selected Antoine Levy (PhD, MIT) as the winner of the Hoyt Dissertation Award.  But because the pool was so strong, they also selected three honorable mentions: Phillip Mulder (PhD, Wharton), Jaehee Song (PhD, Yale), and Juan Pablo Uribe (PhD, Brown).  As for the Real Estate Economics prizes, congratulations to Andrea Eisfeldt and Andrew Demers for winning the Edward Mills best paper prize, for their paper, Total Returns to Single-Family Rentals, and to Tingyu Zhou for winning the best REE referee award.  

Finally, we announced our newest award, the John Clapp Best Doctoral Poster Award, named for John in honor of his longstanding involvement with the doctoral poster event and his mentorship of graduate students and junior scholars more generally. Hsi-Ling Liao from NYU won the best poster award.  Thanks to Nate Baum-Snow and the Awards committee, and congratulations to all the winners!

We are looking forward to lots of activities and events in 2023.  The submission portal for our 51st National Meeting is now open and will remain so until midnight on February 3.  You can only submit your paper after logging into the membership portal on the AREUEA Website. You’ll find the Call for Papers link directly below the "Welcome" Member banner.   If you have not purchased or renewed your membership for 2023, you will be given that opportunity by clicking on the link. The portal also invites submissions to join our third cohort of junior scholars, who also present at the conference.  This year, the national meeting will be held at the Westin in Washington, DC on June 1-2, 2023.  David Geltner will deliver the Quigley Medal address during one of the two lunches, and we will hold a Policy Forum panel during the other lunch. Please mark your calendars and submit your papers! 

Please also mark your calendars for the international conference, which will be held this year from July 19-July 22 in Cambridge, England.  The submission portal will be open soon, and the deadline for submission of papers and extended abstracts will be April 30th. Finally, next year’s AREUEA/ASSA conference will be held in San Antonio from January 5-7th, 2024.  Look out for an email invitation in February to submit papers to that conference. 

In addition to these in-person events, we are looking forward to another great virtual seminar series, which will be held again on Wednesdays from 11:30am-1:00pm ET.  David Low is leading the organizing committee this year.  If you would like to present your work, please submit your work to David via email ([email protected]).  

We will also use this time-slot to host the next virtual policy forum on Wednesday March 8th.  The discussion will focus on addressing restrictive land use regulations and will feature exciting new research from two AREUEA scholars: Evan Mast and Jaehee Song.  They will be joined by Solomon Greene, who leads HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research, and Terner Center Policy Director David Garcia, who has had a front row seat to debates around the many pro-housing bills that the California state legislature has recently passed (or considered).  As a reminder, the Policy Forum aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers and policymakers in real estate and urban economics. Each policy forum event has an associated webpage, where we post the video of the event, summaries of the featured research, and links to other relevant papers and resources.  We have a few other policy forum ideas brewing, but please send your ideas for additional topics.  

All of this takes a lot of work, so thank you to all the committee members and volunteers who make these events happen.  Thank you to our outgoing board members: Abdullah Yavas (president in 2020), Andrea Heuson (Secretary), Nate Baum-Snow, Leah Brooks, Moussa Diop, and Jiro Yoshida. We are sorry to see them leave the board, but we are excited to welcome our new board members: Albert Saiz (Second VP), Jackie Begley, Dragana Cvijanovic, Jorge De la Roca, and Rachel Meltzer.  

Thanks to the many of you who volunteered to serve on AREUEA committees this year. We received about 60 responses to our email solicitation.  While we will not have room for all of you on our committees this year, we were gratified by your willingness to pitch in, and please continue to look out for ways to get involved.  Thank you to PC&I officer Stephanie Moulton for all her work to help us make the association more inclusive.  

Last, but definitely not least, I want to send a big thank you to outgoing president Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh for his hard work and amazing leadership. He has made great strides in both elevating the quality of AREUEA scholarship and making the association more inclusive and supportive of emerging scholars.  He has set a very high bar for the rest of us to follow!

Please let me know if you have ideas for AREUEA programming or ways to attract new members. 

Best wishes for 2023, 

Ingrid Gould Ellen
President AREUEA

 

Previous President Letters

President's Letter | June 2022
President's Letter | January 2022