UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Susan M. Wachter, the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate and professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, will deliver the fourth Austin J. Jaffe Real Estate Lecture at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 13 in 120 Business Building on Penn State's University Park campus.
The title of Wachter’s lecture will be “Real Estate and the Challenge of Cycles.” Attendees can RSVP for the lecture to attend in person or via Zoom to receive additional information.
“Every year, Smeal’s real estate faculty meet to discuss potential speakers and hand-selects a candidate who is held in high esteem in their field and will provide the most insights into industry topics of interest to our students,” said Brent Ambrose, Jason and Julie Borrelli Faculty Chair in Real Estate and director of Smeal’s Borrelli Institute for Real Estate Studies.
“The Austin Jaffe Real Estate Lecture series was created in 2020 to honor the memory of my colleague and good friend Austin Jaffe,” said Ambrose. “We are very excited to have Susan Wachter from the University of Pennsylvania share her insights on housing economics and mortgage finance in the Austin Jaffe Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the generous gift from Austin’s wife, Lynn; children Alex and Roxanne; and Austin’s friends.”
As the second most-cited author among academics who publish in real estate economics journals globally, Wachter is an economist known for developing a model explaining why real estate is subject to booms and busts. With more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and books published, she received the 2022 John M. Quigley Medal for Advancing Real Estate and Urban Economics.
Wachter is director of Wharton’s Geographical Information Systems Lab and co-directs the Penn Institute for Urban Research. In addition, she served as assistant secretary for Policy Development and Research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1998 to 2001.
The lecture series honors the late Austin Jaffe, who was the Philip H. Sieg Professor of Business Administration at the Smeal College of Business and served as the associate dean for international programs, the associate director of the Institute for Real Estate Studies, and chair of the Department of Risk Management before retiring after nearly 40 years at Penn State. Jaffe passed away in May 2019.
As a frontrunner in real estate studies, Jaffe’s legacy lives on in the lecture series — which brings renowned real estate scholars to Penn State to share their knowledge and navigate industry topics with students.
The Jaffe family’s endowment makes the Austin Jaffe Real Estate Lecture series possible, which kicked off its inaugural event in 2021 with speaker Abdullah Yavas, Robert E. Wangard Real Estate Chair at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. Since then, it has welcomed Gilles Duranton, Dean’s Chair in Real Estate and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in March 2022, and Wenlan Qian, Ng Teng Fong Chair Professor in Real Estate and professor at the National University of Singapore in November 2022.