Finance Seminar

Title: Property Taxes and Housing Allocation Under Financial Constraints
Speaker: Arpit Gupta, Associate Professor in Finance, New York University Stern
Date: Friday, 28 March 2025
Time: 10.45 - 12.00
Location: Plattenstrasse 14, 8032 Zurich, Room PLM-F-103/104

The seminar is open to the public. No registration necessary.

Arpit Gupta is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His research focuses on real estate markets, household finance, and urban economics, with an emphasis on market frictions such as illiquidity, information asymmetries, and financial constraints. His recent work explores the effects of remote work on housing markets and the role of zoning regulations in housing affordability. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.

What is the main focus of your research?
My research focuses on how real estate affects household balance sheets and economic outcomes. My focus is on the frictions in real estate markets — such as information asymmetries, illiquidity, and financial constraints — and how they impact household welfare and decision-making. Much of my recent work focuses on the role of housing regulations such as zoning on housing affordability. Here, I have been very excited to explore new LLM tools to systematically process and categorize the contents of a large number of municipal zoning documents.

What is a key finding from your research, and how does it impact everyday life, the real estate industry, or policymaking?
A key finding has been the disruptive role of remote work for both residential and commercial real estate markets. My work has found that the post-pandemic period has seen a huge rise in suburban migration in the United States, leading to increases in suburban house prices, at the cost of urban cores (and especially the valuations of office buildings in these cores), as fully-remote and hybrid work has taken off. This finding points to important challenges for urban environments in the years to come.

What inspired you to focus on the study of real estate markets?
I graduated college in 2009, and saw first hand the broad implications of real estate for economic fluctuations and outcomes. At the same time, I realized that data availability was increasing strongly in the area, which made it a good fit for applying modern econometric techniques. 

In your opinion, what emerging trends or issues in the real estate market are likely to gain importance in the coming years?
Ongoing innovations in transportation technology — including self-driving cars (AVs) and electronic vehicles (EVs) are likely to reshape urban environments, and thereby impact real estate values. Additionally, many markets around the world are facing large drops in fertility. This depopulation may result in substantial value declines in real estate around the world if trends continue.