Urban Economics Lab

Data centers are among the most capital-intensive investments in the modern economy, yet once operational they employ very few workers. Communities are competing hard, and spending real public money, to attract them. So do they actually create jobs in the surrounding economy?

This is a hard question to answer well. Data centers don't locate randomly! They choose counties with cheap power, fiber, and available land, places that may already be on stronger growth paths. Effects unfold over several years, and facilities range from a few megawatts to hundreds. Thus, isolating the causal effect is difficult.

With Ernesto Aldana, Simon Camilo Büchler, Alexander Carlo, Albert Saiz, and Carles Vergara-Alert, we combine proprietary asset-level data on 1,584 US data centers with two complementary designs: synthetic difference-in-differences around a county's first activation, and local projections that relate outcomes to installed capacity. 

Hofstra University’s Breslin Center for Real Estate Studies and Frank G. Zarb School of Business present "Current Topics in Real Estate: Affordability and Technological Advancements" featuring MIT Professor Albert Saiz. The conference will examine the trends in affordability and emerging technologies and its impact on real estate and related investments.

The David Ricardo Medal recognizes a scholar who has created a significant body of published research in academic and refereed professional journals, spanning at least two decades, that includes multiple important, influential writings in journals and/or books. This award represents the highest recognition by ARES of scholarly work in the real estate discipline. The honoree shall be a recognized thought leader, as evidenced by extensive citations of her/his scholarly research in recognized textbooks, treatises and articles. The recipient shall have profoundly influenced the research directions, teaching, public policy, and/or practice of the real estate discipline. 

2025 Benchmark Study Report produced by the MIT Urban Economics revealed that women have made progress in three areas: (1) a decline in the gender pay gap, (2) stability in women’s compensation and satisfaction during negative market cycles, and (3) increased flexibility through remote and hybrid work opportunities.  

However, the gender gap still persists in career continuity, representation, culture, and perceptions. Leaders must continue to address these issues and work to close the gap.

Read the paper.

The new MIT Center for Real Estate working paper, "Housing Investments and Well-being in Slums: Observational Evidence from Colombia," by Prof. Albert Saiz (with Gustavo A. García, Juliana Lalinde Velasquez, Daniela Mejía Tejada, and Juan Carlos Munoz Mora from Universidad EAFIT), explores how improving the living conditions inside slum dwellings is associated with well-being.

The paper uses a rich set of novel information on the inside quality of over 1,000 informal dwellings in Colombia. It combines expert engineering assessments of housing quality with AI-based ratings from 11,000 photos of homes’ interiors and exteriors, and a household survey covering health, satisfaction, and family dynamics.

Read the paper.

Professor Albert Saiz gave a keynote at the Sustainable Cities workshop with the World Bank. He presented his research on how the presence of natural barriers influences transportation environments and urban densities across the globe.

The paper introduces three novel indexes: the share of natural barriers, non-convexity (a measure of natural fragmentation), and the average road detour to measure and study the practical reach and effects of natural barriers around global cities. It calculates these indexes for areas in and around four separate global city-boundary definitions, augmenting the original data with relevant additional variables. 

Read the paper.

Last week, Prof. Albert Saiz presented at the ROCKWOOL Foundation Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. He gave a keynote talk on the global housing affordability crisis.

Conference Website.

Natural disasters have been increasing in intensity and frequency, displacing millions of people across the globe and pushing them to seek refuge elsewhere. How does the arrival of natural disaster-induced migrants shape neighborhoods and housing markets? A new working paper by Vinicios Sant'Anna and coauthors investigates the impact of climate-induced migration on residential real estate markets in receiving areas. Specifically, the research focuses on the 1930s American Dust Bowl, a period of severe drought and dust storms that ravaged the Great Plains during the 1930s, forcing a mass exodus of residents. The paper studies how the influx of migrants fleeing the Dust Bowl affected housing dynamics in Los Angeles, the primary destination for these climate refugees.

Read the paper.