Climate and Real Estate Initiative Inaugural Symposium

December 4-5, 2022, Cambridge MA
(with a special issue at the Journal of Regional Science)

Call for Papers

Climate change produces more frequent and intense natural disasters, putting tens of millions of properties at an increasingly large physical and financial risk. In addition to incurring a substantial welfare cost on homeowners, mounting risk could threaten the stability of the property market and macroeconomy itself. At the same time, the real estate sector consumes 40% of world energy annually and is responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Given its volume, reducing emissions from the sector is central to achieving climate change mitigation goals. 

The real estate sector’s vulnerability and its contribution to climate change call for innovative research at the intersection of climate change and real estate. In particular, a symposium on Climate Change and Real Estate Economics and Finance, hosted by the Center for Real Estate at MIT, calls for papers on the following topics:

• Estimating the impact of climate risk (both physical risk and transition risk) on residential and/or commercial real estate
• Evaluating the effect of climate change adaptation and resilience measures in the real estate sector
• Evaluating measures to mitigate the real estate sector’s contribution to climate change

We seek novel research papers with rigorous theoretical and/or empirical analyses on questions within these topics. We especially welcome submissions by early-career scholars and from scholars who are under-represented in economics. 

Date

Dec 4-5 (Sunday and Monday), 2022

Location 

MIT Campus (Cambridge, MA) unless federal, state, local, or University guidelines on COVID safety necessitates a change. 

Keynote Speakers

Benjamin Keys (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), Amine Ouazad (HEC Montreal), and Nancy Wallace (Hass School, UC Berkeley). 

Submission 

All papers must be submitted here (https://forms.gle/Tvba5ZPK915teXVP6) by September 15, 2022, at 11:59 pm ET. Authors will be notified about inclusion in each symposium by early October. Submissions of complete papers are preferred, but we will consider extended abstracts that include a discussion of the research’s results and conclusions.

Organizers

Seunghoon Lee (Postdoctoral Associate, MIT/CRE)

Juan Palacios (Postdoctoral Associate and Director of the MIT/CRE Climate and Real Estate Initiative, MIT/CRE)

Simon Buechler (Postdoctoral Fellow and Director of the Price Dynamics Platform, MIT/CRE)

Siqi Zheng (Faculty Director of MIT/CRE, and STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability)

Please contact [email protected] with any questions regarding the symposiums. This call is not exclusive and can be shared with others.

Invited speakers are expected to participate in the entire 2-day symposium and there is no fee for attending. We will cover and arrange 2 nights of accommodation for invited speakers who travel from outside of the Greater Boston area. Participants are responsible for paying for and arranging their travel arrangements. 

Special Issue at the Journal of Regional Science:

The Journal of Regional Science will consider, after anonymous peer review, a subset of the papers selected to be presented at the symposium for inclusion in a Special Issue on Climate Change and Real Estate.

When you submit your manuscript to the conference online (via this link) select yes to the question “The Editors at the Journal of Regional Science will solicit papers from this symposium for a special issue. Please indicate that, if your paper is selected into our symposium, do you want to submit it to the special issue?”

Tentative timeline of the special issue

• August 31, 2022, at 11:59 pm ET: Deadline for submission of papers to the symposium.
• October 2022: Authors will be notified about inclusion in each symposium.
• December 4 and 5, 2022: Presentation of selected papers at the MIT Climate and Real Estate Initiative Inaugural Symposium.
• January 15, 2023 : Full paper submission to the special issue and the start of standard anonymous review process.

The special issue aims to provide timely outlets for cutting edge research on the aforementioned topics. In particular, we will make all final acceptance decisions by the end of July 2023. 

Guest Editors for this special Issue: Prof. Siqi Zheng (MIT Center for Real Estate); Prof. Edward Coulson (UCI Center for Real Estate); Dr. Juan Palacios (MIT Center for Real Estate)