The Fisher Center annually sponsors a research grant program available to all UC Berkeley Ph.D. students with research projects in the areas of real estate, real estate finance, and urban economics. Over the past twenty years, the Center has given out more than $2,000,000 to over 100 students and faculty at Berkeley.
The Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics has a limited amount of funding available for research proposals for UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidates and invites you to submit a proposal to fund research for fiscal year 2025/26. (Please note that this year the Fisher Center is not funding faculty research projects.)
Faculty may sponsor a Ph.D. student by submitting a letter of recommendation, along with a brief description of the student’s project, HERE.
PROPOSAL DUE DATE: Friday, May 2, 2025
TOPICS: Research related to real estate asset and capital markets, spatial economics, agglomeration and urban economics, climate risk and sustainability, housing and mortgage markets, or consumer credit – all broadly defined.
FUNDING PERIOD: August 1, 2025 through May 30, 2026
TOTAL FUNDING AMOUNT: Up to $15,000 per project
PhD PROPOSALS MUST INCLUDE:
- A brief description of the project
- A letter from the faculty sponsor
PhD STUDENT REQUIREMENTS:
- All Ph.D. proposals must be submitted through a faculty member.
- Student must have passed orals and received thesis committee approval before the start of the Fall 2025 semester in August 2025.
- Student must register for and attend the weekly Research Seminar in Real Estate and the graduate student preseminar in both Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters.
- Submit at least one working paper on the research topic. The paper must include a one-page abstract and, with faculty approval, it will be included in the Center’s working paper series.
APPLICATION: SUBMISSION FORM (LINK)
NOTIFICATION: Decisions will be made by the Fisher Center’s Research Grants Committee. Applicants will be notified by June 30, 2025.
For more information on applying, please contact Thomas Chappelear via email ([email protected]) or call 510-643-6109. A pdf of this information can also be downloaded here.
2024-2025 Fisher Center Grant Recipients
Javier Feinmann, PhD Candidate, Economics
This project has two main contributions. First, we document property wealth segregation across minorities in the municipality of São Paulo. We also calculate the implications for property tax burden across these groups. A key feature of our analysis is that, by using detailed ownership information, we can assign properties owned by firms to individuals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to track ultimate owners of properties and show how wealth distribution changes when we account for it. Second, we study how property affect business location decisions and economic activity outcomes. Ultimately, we want to understand whether property taxes affect net economic activity or if they should be considered as a redistribution policy within regions.
Lucy Hackett, PhD Candidate, Agricultural and Resource Economics
Managing rapid urban sprawl is a major policy concern in emerging cities. We study the costs of sprawl in terms of the public goods externality it imposes on local governments and the trade-offs related to regulating city growth in the context of Mexico. Using microdata on housing prices and new housing developments, we study the effects of a policy that limits urban expansion by restricting federally backed mortgage provision to already-serviced areas. We empirically analyze the effects of this policy both within- and across cities and develop a dynamic spatial model to characterize the welfare implications of our empirical findings.
Flávia Leite, PhD Candidate, City and Regional Planning
My dissertation research project asks: How does formal homeownership affect housing affordability, stability, and debt consumption for low-income beneficiaries of the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program in São Paulo, Brazil? By attempting to answer this question through the integration of a quasi-experiment, computational methods, and interviews, I hope to provide a more nuanced understanding of the impact of housing formalization on low-income households and the challenges and opportunities of formal homeownership as a policy goal.
Paula Meloni, PhD Candidate, Haas School of Business
Formalizing informal transit: Evidence from Mexico City’s informal transit system
Alice Schmitz, PhD Candidate, Economics
While there is a breadth of work examining the adaptation choices of homeowners, there is limited evidence on how renters respond to natural disaster risk. My project seeks to examine how information on flood risk shapes tenant location choices and estimate the costs of misclassifying flood risk. In particular, I will study the effect of informing tenants of a property’s location in a FEMA-designated floodplain, using the passage of state laws which require landlords to disclose flood risk in leases.
Elaine Shen, PhD Candidate, Economics
Who self-selects into financial literacy education? Does positive self-selection lead to greater inequality or measurement bias when evaluating the impact of financial literacy education? Financial literacy education has long been thought of as a potential policy tool for promoting economic mobility, reducing inequality, and improving long-term financial outcomes for individuals and households. However, the evidence evaluating the impact of financial literacy education on real-world financial outcomes remains somewhat weak. By combining administrative data on a large financial literacy class with a lab-in-field experiment, we evaluate whether there is positive selection into financial literacy education.