Christopher Palmer

Christopher Palmer is the Albert and Jeanne Clear Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he teaches corporate finance. His research focuses on how credit, real estate, and labor markets respond to periods of significant upheaval.

Palmer is also a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an Affiliate with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab. He previously taught real estate finance at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and was a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Prior to graduate school, he consulted with Compass-Lexecon.

Palmer holds a BA in economics and mathematics from Brigham Young University and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Current Research Focus: Palmer's research focuses on how credit, real estate, and labor markets respond to periods of significant upheaval. His current research projects include studying the consequences of how consumers shop for credit, how households strategically use bankruptcy laws, how to improve federal housing entitlements, the effectiveness of disclosure laws, and how people form expectations about future house prices.

Education
Ph.D., Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2014
B.A. and B.S., Economics and Mathematics, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, April 2008

Positions Held
At Haas since 2014
2015 – present, Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
2014 – present, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
2014 – present, Faculty Associate, Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics

External Service and Assignments
- 2011 – 2015, Small Business Mentor, G&V Tailoring - 2011 – 2014, Visiting Fellow, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston - 2002, 2006 – 2007, Summer Research Analyst, Compass Lexecon

Selected Papers and Publications

“Why Did So Many Subprime Borrowers Default During the Crisis: Loose Credit or Plummeting Prices?” Working Paper, July 2014.

“IV Quantile Regression for Group-Level Treatments with an Application to the Distributional Effects of Trade” Econometrica, Forthcoming with Denis Chetverikov and Brad Larsen.

“Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Journal of Political Economy, June 2014, with David Autor and Parag Pathak.

“Heteroskedasticity-Robust Inference in Finite Samples.” Economics Letters, August 2012, with Jerry Hausman.

Teaching
- PHDBA289S Research Seminar in Real Estate - MFE230M Asset-Backed Securitization - PHDBA298 Topics in Real Estate Finance

Honors and Awards
- 2015 – present, Barbara and Gerson Bakar Faculty Fellow - 2012 – 2014, Humane Studies Fellow - 2011, Lincoln Institute C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship - 2008, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship