Fisher Center for Real Estate & Urban Economics
Research
The Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics (FCREUE) is one of the major university centers in the United States for research on real estate markets, energy efficiency, financial institutions, the California Economy, and other urban and regional economy topics. The Center supports an in-house research program, research by faculty associates, and dissertation research by doctoral students. The research activities of the Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy operate separately within the Fisher Center. See the links below to these components of the Fisher Center real estate activities.
Research and Policy Reports
Downloadable Working Papers
Hard Copy Working Papers (Prior to 2004)
Reprints (2006 and earlier)
Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy
Major Research Areas:
- Energy Efficiency and Green Building: FCREUE has recently embarked on a series of studies related to sustainability and green building. Topics range from financial instruments related to energy efficient designs, to property value effects of cool communities, to understanding innovation in green sectors.
- Mortgage Markets, Institutions and Instruments: Research includes studies of the mortgage market, securitization of real estate, REITs, CMOS, IPOs, and on the impacts of institutional changes in finance on real estate production and operations.
- Globalization, Offshoring, and Global Real Estate: Fifteen years of research on foreign trade, globalization, and offshoring of both manufacturing and services production have led to an book, and numerous articles; current work focuses on the impacts of these changes on labor markets in the US and throughout the world. Research also focuses on world wide real estate markets, the changes wrought in the industry as economies become more globally integrated, and most recently the consequences of the global financial crisis on housing markets throughout the world.
- Housing Markets and Policy: Research published through FCREUE addresses both homeowner and rental markets, housing cycles, issues of affordability, hedonic models of housing demand, price indices, housing issues after disasters (natural and financial), and international housing markets. Fisher Center research has contributed to the national policy debate both prior to and following the credit crisis.
- Commercial and Industrial Real Estate: FCREUE examines trends in office, industrial and retail space, and analyzes the impacts of economic and legislative changes on the structure of office and industrial markets. Faculty research addresses option pricing models for pricing commercial and retail real estate leases in the commercial mortgage backed securities markets.
- The California Economy: FCREUE has an expertise on California’s economy and real estate markets, built from following changing economic conditions over the past 2 decades and more. Research on other topics often uses California as a case example of more broadly applicable trends and transformations.
- Agglomeration, Urbanization, and Real Estate: Theoretical and empirical research addresses economic and institutional factors shaping the size, form and function of urban areaas and the operation of urban land and real estate markets.
- Industry Studies and Emerging Technologies: Research focuses on industries that drive demand for commercial and industrial space, and innovative sectors that have reshaped the state and national economies. A series of papers on high tech sectors and the economic geography of a range of services sectors have been subjects of research.
- Governance and Real Estate: Research focuses on the basic economics of local government, including privatization (broadly defined), local political economics, and the impacts of growth controls and other policies on real estate markets, as well as the fiscal effects of fluctuations in real estate markets on local and state governments.
