About

Andra Ghent is a Professor of Finance at the University of Utah where she holds the Ivory-Boyer Chair in Real Estate. She is the Academic Director of the Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center. Her current research interests are real estate finance, financial intermediation, and urban economics. Her research has been cited in US congressional testimony and by media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Bloomberg. Her research has been published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Management Science, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Financial Studies. She is an Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial Economics. She teaches courses on housing affordability and real estate finance.

Research topics

• Finance
• Business
• Monetary economics
• Economics
• Actuarial science
• Financial system
• Financial economics
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

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

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

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

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

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Imitation Game: The Imitation Game: How Encouraging Renegotiation Makes Good Borrowers Bad

  Review of Financial Studies · 2024-09-24 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract We show that commercial mortgage borrowers behave opportunistically to attempt to obtain principal reductions. We develop a model in which lenders cannot perfectly observe borrowers’ use values and renegotiation is costly. We then exploit a tax rule change that reduced the cost of renegotiation. Consistent with the model predictions, borrowers with high private use values of the property are more likely to transfer into special servicing when lenders have a higher capacity to negotiate principal reductions after the rule change. Our results suggest adverse consequences of principal forgiveness for lenders.

  PublisherDOI

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

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

  article

  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 access

  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

• Renegotiating Commercial Loans: Getting a Discounted Payoff is Possible But Complicated

  eCommons (Cornell University) · 2024-09-10

  articleOpen access

  In times of crisis, some hotel owners find themselves overwhelmed by debt and face a difficult dilemma?either keep putting more of their money into their troubled assets or stop paying their mortgages and lose their hotels to foreclosure. This is an undesirable outcome for both borrowers and lenders. Borrowers lose their investments in the foreclosed property as well as their reputation. On the other hand, lenders recover substantially less than the property?s market value due to various costs and expenses associated with foreclosure.

  Publisher

• The Impact of COVID Restrictions on Business Dynamics

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

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Determinants and Consequences of Return to Office Policies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• 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

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

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

  articleOpen access

  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

Frequent coauthors

• Marianna Kudlyak

  Hoover Institution

  36 shared

• Michael T. Owyang

  14 shared

• Rubén Hernández‐Murillo

  Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

  10 shared

• Sean Flynn

  9 shared

• Morris A. Davis

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  7 shared

• Sean Flynn

  7 shared

• Rossen Valkanov

  7 shared

• Walter N. Torous

  6 shared