About

Morris A. Davis is the Paul V. Profeta Chair of Real Estate and the Academic Director of the Center for Real Estate Studies at Rutgers Business School. He previously held the position of James A. Graaskamp Chair of Real Estate in the Department of Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was the Academic Director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate. Dr. Davis is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Senior Scholar of the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and an independent director of the AGNC Investment Corp., a mortgage REIT. Earlier in his career, he was an economist at the Federal Reserve Board, where he routinely briefed Alan Greenspan on housing and macroeconomics. He is widely published on issues related to the U.S. housing markets and has developed price indexes for land in residential use. Dr. Davis is regularly interviewed by NPR Marketplace, Bloomberg Radio, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times on house prices and housing markets, and he is a frequent lecturer at universities and central banks around the world. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Research topics

• Economics
• Econometrics
• Labour economics
• Business
• Agricultural economics

Selected publications

• The Effect of Capital Gains Taxes on Business Creation and Employment: The Case of Opportunity Zones

  Management Science · 2024-09-17 · 14 citations

  article

  The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 established a new program called Opportunity Zones (OZs) that reduces or eliminates capital gains taxes on investment in a limited number of low-income Census tracts. We provide a model illustrating how a change in capital taxation affects employment in existing and new establishments. We then use establishment-level data to show that, in its first two years, the OZ designation increased employment growth relative to comparable tracts by between 3.0 and 4.5 percentage points in metropolitan areas. The job growth occurred in multiple industries and persisted into 2021 rather than quickly disappearing. However, most of the jobs created by the program were likely taken by residents who live outside of the designated tracts, consistent with only 5% of U.S. residents working in the same Census tract as the one in which they live. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: The authors are grateful for the financial support of an award from UW-Madison’s Fall Research Competition. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03223 .

  PublisherDOI

• The Work-From-Home Technology Boon and its Consequences

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2024-01-25 · 51 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We study the impact of widespread adoption of work-from-home (WFH) technology using an equilibrium model where people choose where to live, how to allocate their time between working at home and at the office, and how much space to use in production. Motivated by cross-sectional evidence on WFH, we model WFH as a complement to work at the office. Simulations of the model indicate that the pandemic induced a large change to the relative productivity of WFH that substantially increased home prices and will permanently affect incomes, income inequality, and city structure.

  PublisherDOI

• Winners and Losers from the Work-from-Home Technology Boon

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-12-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We model how an increase in Work-from-Home (WFH) productivity differentially affects workers using a framework in which some workers cannot work offsite, some are hybrid, and some are completely remote. The improvement in WFH productivity increases housing demand and thus housing prices since housing is inelastically supplied. Because workers in non-telecommutable occupations must consume housing but their total factor productivity does not increase, the rise in house prices reduces their welfare. The welfare decline is equivalent to 1-9% of consumption, depending on how substitutable WFH is with onsite work, and it arises despite measured income of all workers increasing.

  PublisherDOI

• Winners and Losers from the Work-from-Home Technology Boon

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Winners and Losers from the Work-from-Home Technology Boon

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for The Work-from-Home Technology Boon and its Consequences

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-09-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication package for "The Work-from-Home Technology Boon and its Consequence", Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming. Replication package contains all data and programs to produce tables and results used in paper.

  PublisherDOI

• Preferences over the Racial Composition of Neighborhoods: Estimates and Implications

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Preferences over the Racial Composition of Neighborhoods: Estimates and Implications

  2023-01-01 · 10 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We estimate the parameters of a dynamic, forward-looking neighborhood choice model in 197 metro areas where households have preferences over the racial composition of neighborhoods. Our inclusion of multiple metro areas in the estimation sample enables us to develop a new, shift-share IV strategy to estimate the impact of the racial composition of neighborhoods on location choice that relies only on across-metro comparisons of similarly situated neighborhoods. For the "shift," we use national data to determine the probabilities different types of households live in different neighborhoods in a metro when neighborhoods are ranked only by within-metro income quantiles. The "shares" are the metro-level population shares of each household type. Thus, the instrument predicts variation in neighborhood-level racial shares, which for a given within-metro income quantile is attributable exclusively to variation in metrolevel type shares. The overall IV estimate is a weighted average of the contribution from all of the income quantiles. We use the tools of Goldsmith-Pinkham, Sorkin, and Swift (2020) to analyze the comparisons that are weighted most heavily for identification and to derive appropriate balance tests. Our key finding is that many households have very strong preferences to live in same-race neighborhoods. These preferences are so strong that the current demographic composition of neighborhoods is not stable.

  PublisherDOI

• Preferences over the Racial Composition of Neighborhoods: Estimates and Implications

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Quarter Century of Mortgage Risk

  European Finance Review · 2022-05-17 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article provides a comprehensive history of default risk for newly originated home mortgages in the USA over the past quarter century. The loan-level source data include the entire guarantee book for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We track many loan characteristics and produce a summary measure of risk. Among our many results, we show that mortgage risk had already risen in the 1990s, planting seeds of the financial crisis well before the actual event. Our results also cast doubt on explanations of the crisis that focus on borrowers with low credit scores. The aggregate series are available for download at https://www.fhfa.gov/papers/wp1902.aspx.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert F. Martin

  McGill University

  30 shared

• Jesse Gregory

  23 shared

• Randall Wright

  Wisconsin School of Professional Psychology

  18 shared

• Jonathan Heathcote

  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

  17 shared

• S. Borağan Aruoba

  13 shared

• Stephen D. Oliner

  American Enterprise Institute

  11 shared

• Joshua Gallin

  Federal Reserve Board of Governors

  10 shared

• Michael G. Palumbo

  Federal Reserve

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of Pennsylvania

  1998

Awards & honors

• Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
• Senior Scholar of the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Insti…
• independent director of the AGNC Investment Corp. (ticker: A…
• appointed to the Council of Economic Advisers to the preside…