Leading Insights Landing Image

At the Forefront of Their Fields

At Columbia Business School, our faculty members are at the forefront of research in their respective fields, offering innovative ideas that directly impact the practice of business today. A quick glance at our publication on faculty research, CBS Insights, will give you a sense of the breadth and immediacy of the insight our professors provide.

As a student at the School, this will greatly enrich your education. In Columbia classrooms, you are at the cutting-edge of industry, studying the practices that others will later adopt and teach. As any business leader will tell you, in a competitive environment, being first puts you at a distinct advantage over your peers. Learn economic development from Ray Fisman, the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and a rising star in the field, or real estate from Chris Mayer, the Paul Milstein Professor of Real Estate, a renowned expert and frequent commentator on complex housing issues. This way, when you complete your degree, you'll be set up to succeed.

The Columbia Advantage

Columbia Business School in conjunction with the Office of the Dean provides its faculty, PhD students, and other research staff with resources and cutting edge tools and technology to help push the boundaries of business research.

Specifically, our goal is to seamlessly help faculty set up and execute their research programs. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Highly skilled staff of full-time predoctoral fellows, summer research interns, and part-time research assistants
  • Access to centralized funding from the Dean's office and external grants to support research activities
  • Providing a state-of-the-art high-performance grid computing environment
  • Acquisition of proprietary data sets and access to various databases
  • Leading library which provides faculty with latest tools and techniques to enable digital scholarship

All these activities help to facilitate and streamline faculty research, and that of the doctoral students working with them.

 

Research at CBS

Filters
Type
Journal Article
Date

Flattening the Curve: Pandemic-Induced Revaluation of Real Estate

Author
Gupta, A., V. Mittal, J. Peeters, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

We show that the COVID-19 pandemic brought house price and rent declines in city centers, and price and rent increases away from the center, thereby flattening the bid-rent curve in most U.S. metropolitan areas. Across MSAs, the flattening of the bid-rent curve is larger when working from home is more prevalent, housing markets are more regulated, and supply is less elastic. Housing markets predict that urban rent growth will exceed suburban rent growth for the foreseeable future.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Working From Home and the Office Real Estate apocalypse

Author
Gupta, Arpit, Vrinda Mittal, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

The authors thank Jonas Peeters, Neel Shah, and Luofeng Zhou for excellent research assistance and CompStak for generously providing data for academic research. We would like to thank Chen Zheng (discussant), Cameron LaPoint (discussant) and seminar participants at AREUEA (DC), AREUEA International (Dublin), the USC Macro-Finance Conference, the Chinese University of Hong Kong finance seminar, National University of Singapore, Columbia Business School finance seminar, and the Urban Economics Association Conference (DC).

Type
Working Paper
Date

Delays in Banks' Loan Loss Provisioning and Economic Downturns: Evidence from the U.S. Housing Market

Author

I study whether banks' loan loss provisioning contributes to economic downturns, by examining the U.S. housing market. Specifically, I examine the aggregate effects of banks' delayed loan loss recognition (DLR) on house prices during the Great Recession and the channels through which these potential effects arose. I construct ZIP-code-level exposure to banks' DLR before the crisis and compare high- and low-exposure ZIP codes during the crisis to examine the aggregate effects of banks' DLR on the housing market.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Take the Q Train: Value Capture of Public Infrastructure Projects

Author
Gupta, Arpit, Constantine Kontokosta, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

We analyze the impact of the Second Avenue Subway (Q-train) construction on local real estate prices, which capitalize the benefits of transit spillovers. We find evidence of higher real estate prices in the vicinity of areas served by the new Q-train, relative to other areas in Manhattan's Upper East Side. Only 30% of the private value created by the subway leads is captured through property taxes, and is insufficient to cover the cost of the subway. Value capture through targeted property tax increases can help close the funding gap.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Journal of Finance

Valuing Private Equity Strip by Strip

Author
Gupta, Arpit and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

We propose a new valuation method for private equity investments. First, we construct a cash-flow replicating portfolio for the private investment, using cash-flows on various listed equity and fixed income instruments. The second step values the replicating portfolio using a flexible asset pricing model that accurately prices the systematic risk in listed equity and fixed income instruments of different horizons.

Type
Journal Article
Date

Global Risk Premiums on Direct Office Real Estate Returns

This article empirically examines the magnitude of risk premiums for direct real estate investments on a global basis. As this article analyzes ex-ante risk premiums over more than 25 years consistently across the world, it enhances current knowledge about the regional differences between risk premiums and helps long-term investors with their global portfolio allocation over time. On a global level, the authors find a risk premium of 4.1% for Gordon’s growth and 3.7% for two-stage growth model. The periodic growth model shows a slightly lower risk premium of 3.1%.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Journal of Finance

Out-of-Town Home Buyers and City Welfare

Author
Favilukis, Jack and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

The major cities of the world have attracted a flurry of out-of-town (OOT) home buyers. Such capital inflows affect housing affordability, the spatial distribution of residents, construction, labor income, wealth, and ultimately welfare. We develop a spatial equilibrium model of a city with substantial heterogeneity among residents. We calibrate the model to the New York and Vancouver metro areas. The observed increase in OOT purchases is associated with 1.1% (5.0%) higher house prices and a 0.1% (0.34%) welfare loss in New York (Vancouver).

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Journal of Financial Economics

Debt Relief and Slow Recovery: A Decade after Lehman

Author
Piskorski, Tomasz and Amit Seru

We follow a representative panel of millions of consumers in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017 and document several facts on the long-term effects of the Great Recession. There were about six million foreclosures in the ten-year period after Lehman's collapse. Owners of multiple homes accounted for 25% of these foreclosures, while comprising only 13% of the market. Foreclosures displaced homeowners, with most of them moving at least once. Only a quarter of foreclosed households regained homeownership, taking an average four years to do so.

Type
Working Paper
Date

Beyond the Balance Sheet Model of Banking: Implications for Bank Regulation and Monetary Policy

Author
Buchak, Greg, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, and Amit Seru

Bank balance sheet lending is commonly viewed as the predominant form of lending. We document and study two margins of adjustment that are usually absent from this view using microdata in the $10 trillion U.S. residential mortgage market. We first document the limits of the shadow bank substitution margin: shadow banks substitute for traditional “deposit-taking” banks in loans which are easily sold, but are limited from activities requiring on-balance-sheet financing.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Review of Economic Studies

Affordable Housing and City Welfare

Author
Favilukis, Jack, Pierre Mabille, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh

Housing affordability has become the main policy challenge for most large cities in the world. Zoning, rent control, housing vouchers, and tax credits are the main levers employed by policy makers. We build a new dynamic stochastic spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the effect of these policies on house prices, rents, residential construction, labor supply, output, income and wealth inequality, as well as the location decision of households within the city. The analysis incorporates risk, wealth effects, and resident landlords.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Journal of Financial Economics

Fintech, Regulatory Arbitrage, and the Rise of Shadow Banks

Author
Buchak, Greg, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, and Amit Seru

Shadow bank market share in residential mortgage origination nearly doubled from 2007 to 2015, with particularly dramatic growth among online "fintech" lenders. We study how two forces, regulatory differences and technological advantages, contributed to this growth.

Type
Journal Article
Date
Journal
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

Mortgage Market Design: Lessons from the Great Recession

Author
Piskorski, Tomasz and Amit Seru

The rigidity of mortgage contracts and a variety of frictions in the design of the market and the intermediation sector hindered efforts to restructure or refinance household debt in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In this paper, we focus on understanding the design and implementation challenges of ex ante and ex post debt relief solutions that are aimed at a more efficient sharing of aggregate risk between borrowers and lenders.