About

Richard Kent Green is a Professor of Policy, Planning, and Development, as well as a Professor of Finance and Business Economics at USC Marshall. He is an expert on housing markets, housing policy, mortgage finance, and urban growth. His research has been published in a wide array of scholarly journals and popular media outlets. Professor Green has served as president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and is the director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. Prior to joining USC, he was a faculty member at George Washington University and the University of Wisconsin, and he served as principal economist and director of financial strategy and policy analysis at Freddie Mac.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Market economy
• Microeconomics
• Labour economics
• Geography
• Finance
• Business
• Demographic economics
• Law
• Econometrics
• Public economics

Selected publications

• The Impact of State and Local Tax Deductions on Household Relocation Decisions: Evidence From the TCJA Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• An integrative round window membrane/cochlear microphysiological system with sensing components for the study of real-time drug response

  Lab on a Chip · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  article

  and compared to published data from animal studies. Cell membrane integrity was also analyzed, and proinflammatory cytokine release was measured using a GFET sensor. We evaluated and monitored the real-time structural integrity of the RWM epithelial barrier using the integrated TEER sensor in the MPS. The sensor's ability to measure TEER and cytokine levels was validated by comparing its readings to those obtained from commercial TEER signal processing equipment and standard cytokine concentration measurements. This ear-on-a-chip design enables high-throughput screening of investigational new drugs, reducing the need for animal models in complex studies of inner ear damage and regeneration. It allows for the real-time study of drug responses. It facilitates the development and identifying novel agents that protect against hearing loss and the design of delivery methods for hearing regeneration compounds.

  PublisherDOI

• Is land‐use deregulation enough to deliver housing?: The case of institutional frictions in India

  Real Estate Economics · 2025-09-22

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper examines whether land use deregulation increases housing supply in the presence of additional institutional frictions, such as ill‐defined property rights. India's urban land ceiling (ULC) laws, which put limits on individual ownership of private vacant land in the largest cities, were repealed during the 2000s. Using a difference‐in‐difference strategy, with a panel of 201 cities, we find that the reform did not lead to housing supply growth. We posit that disputes in ownership rights for vacant parcels rendered the ULC repeal to be ineffective. The disputes led to legal battles between governments and private landowners, freezing construction on vacant land. We find that, after the repeal, the number of land‐related legal proceedings in ULC‐enacting cities may have been substantially higher than in cities where ULC was never enacted. The findings underscore the role of institutional frictions in impeding or delaying the potential benefits of deregulation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do housing regulations affect rural–urban migration? Evidence from rent control in India

  Journal of Economic Geography · 2025-05-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Rent control influences more than housing markets. Using India—a country with heavily regulated housing markets—as a case study, we examine how shifts from pro-tenant to pro-landlord rent control and eviction laws impact rural–urban migration and labor markets. Additionally, we explore potential mechanisms to explain our results on migration. Relaxing rent control leads to higher rents and dampens rural–urban migration, while easing eviction laws facilitates the conversion of rental units into owner-occupied housing and increases the prevalence of “marriage migrants.” The impact of relaxing rent control and eviction laws on rural–urban migration is unexpected, confirming that removing one distortion from a market riddled with others can lead to surprising outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Are Move-In Ready Homes More Expensive?

  The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics · 2024-08-30 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract Most residential homes in developing countries such as India sell before construction is complete. Completed or move-in ready homes command a premium because of the compounded cost of capital and uncertainty costs incurred over time from holding under-construction homes. In this paper, we use listing data from India’s six largest urban agglomerations (UAs) between 2010–2012 and show that sellers expect 2–15% move-in ready premia in five UAs. Moreover, in four UAs, individuals reselling homes expect five to eight percentage points higher move-in ready premia than developers selling new homes because of additional costs incurred by individuals from holding under-construction homes. We do not find any evidence of substantial speculative gains among individual resellers. At mean listed prices, the expected move-in ready premium is 383% of an average household’s annual income in Mumbai, India’s most expensive city. Our findings indicate that within the context of a developing country, lengthy construction times and expensive capital exacerbate already poor affordability conditions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Renter Nonpayment and Landlord Response: Evidence From COVID-19

  Housing Policy Debate · 2022 · 20 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Public economics

  How renters respond to economic hardship, and how landlords respond when tenants fail to make rent, are understudied questions, owing largely to limited data. We use experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to begin answering these questions. Drawing on both new census data and two original surveys of renters in Los Angeles County, we test nine hypotheses about the sources of renter distress and landlord reactions to it. We find that lost work and lost income are the primary drivers of missed or late payments. Most tenants who fell behind entered into repayment plans with their landlords. Eviction threats were uncommon but increased as the pandemic persisted. Landlords were more likely to threaten eviction as tenants fell further behind, and smaller landlords were more likely than larger ones to cut tenant services and threaten or initiate evictions. Our evidence suggests that government income support helped tenants pay rent and thus helped stave off eviction threats. We also find that tenants took on other forms of debt, such as credit cards, loans from family, etc., to make rent. These debt burdens generally will not be relieved by housing assistance, and so require other policy responses.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do urban regulations exacerbate rural-urban inequality? Evidence from rent control in India

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Is housing still the business cycle? Perhaps not.

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2022-06-16 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Green (1998) showed that under a wide range of specifications, residential investment led GDP, while non-residential investment did not. That paper was followed by a number of others, including Coulson and Kim (2000), Davis and Heathcoate (2005) and Leamer (2007) that used more sophisticated techniques than my paper, but found the same outcome - that residential investment led GDP. Leamer famously announced that housing was the business cycle. But in light of the Great Financial Crisis, the subsequent crash in residential investment, and the fundamental changes in the mortgage market, I thought it worth revisiting housing as a leading indicator. Housing is a much weaker leading indicator than before and is much less sensitive to Federal Reserve Policy - especially changes in the Federal Funds Rate - than before. It is possible that the culprit is increasing stringency of local land use policy.

  PublisherDOI

• Insecure property rights and the housing market: Explaining India’s housing vacancy paradox

  Journal of Urban Economics · 2022 · 22 citations

  • Economics
  • Law
  • Microeconomics

  One housing paradox in many markets is the simultaneous presence of high costs and high vacancy rates. India has expensive housing relative to incomes and an urban housing vacancy rate of 12.4%. We show how insecure property rights in India, as a result of rent control and weak contract enforcement, increases vacancy rates. Using a two-way linear fixed effects panel regression, we exploit changes in rent control laws in the states of West Bengal, Karnataka, Gujarat, and Maharashtra to find that pro-tenant laws are positively related to vacancy rates. A pro-landlord policy change liberalizing rent adjustments could potentially reduce vacancy rates by 2.8 to 3.1 percentage points. Contract enforcement measured by density of judges is negatively related to vacancy. We estimate that a policy change in rent control laws would have a net welfare benefit and could reduce India's housing shortage by 7.5%.

  PublisherDOI

• The heterogeneous effects of interactions between parent's education and MSA level college share on children's school enrollment

  Journal of Housing Economics · 2022-05-10 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Patric H. Hendershott

  Fisher College

  12 shared

• Stephen Malpezzi

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  10 shared

• James D. Shilling

  9 shared

• Arthur Acolin

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• Susan M. Wächter

  8 shared

• Heather L. Schwartz

  RAND Corporation

  8 shared

• Raphael W. Bostic

  Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

  8 shared

• Lois M. Davis

  7 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Wisconsin

• M.S.

  George Washington University