About

Juan Palacios is an assistant professor at Maastricht University and a visiting assistant professor at the Center for Real Estate (CRE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on environmental economics, sustainable real estate, and health economics. Currently, he is concentrating on the effect of indoor air pollution on individual productivity and health.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Economics
• Operations research
• Psychology
• Virology
• Internal medicine
• Psychiatry
• Biology
• Environmental health
• Marketing
• Mathematics
• Gerontology
• Demographic economics
• Geography
• Engineering
• Business

Selected publications

• Pollution and Cognitive Performance: A Field Experiment in High Schools

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-07-03

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• Unequal impacts of rising temperatures on global human sentiment

  One Earth · 2025-08-21 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Climate change poses growing risks to human well-being, yet research on its emotional impact has primarily focused on developed nations, obscuring potential global inequalities in psychological vulnerability. Here, we analyze over 1.2 billion social media posts from 157 countries to reveal how rising temperatures affect human sentiment worldwide and project future impacts under climate scenarios. We find a non-linear relationship where moderate warming can improve sentiment in cooler regions, but temperatures above 35°C negatively impact emotional well-being globally, with effects three times greater in low- and middle-income countries (25.0% decline in sentiment) than in high-income countries (8.1%). Even accounting for climate adaptation through income growth, we project global average sentiment will be 2.3% lower in 2100 than in 2019 due to future warming, indicating lasting psychological costs disproportionately burdening the world's poorest populations. These findings underscore the urgent need for climate policies that integrate emotional impacts and address inequalities in psychological climate vulnerability.

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Tailored Information on Household Heat Pump Demand

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-03-25

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• Climate Risk and Collateral Misreporting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Tailored Information on Household Heat Pump Demand

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-03-25

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  PublisherDOI

• Timing Sustainable Engagement in Real Asset Investments

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

  articleOpen access
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• Timing Sustainable Engagement in Real Asset Investments

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-07-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access

  This paper estimates the effect of sustainable shareholder engagement on firm's investments.We study the real estate industry where investments are sporadic and occur following depreciation cycles.SEC restrictions (rule 240.14a-8) on shareholder proposals, in combination with the asset depreciation cycles, create random variation enabling us to identify firms' sustainable investment decisions.Using unique micro-data tracking investments in all public US commercial real estate properties over the past two decades, we find that sustainable engagement effectively steers firms to initiate tangible and long-lasting sustainable retrofits.However, engagement is ineffective or impairs such investments when it does not coincide with reinvestment periods, or investors vote down the proposal.

  PublisherDOI

• Health implications of housing retrofits: Evidence from a population-wide weatherization program

  Journal of Health Economics · 2024-10-31 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study provides the first population-representative quasi-experimental estimates on the impact of housing upgrades on occupant health. We analyze the exceptional period of renovations in East Germany following the German reunification during the 1990s. Triggered by one of the largest governmental loan programs in history, 3.6 million dwellings were renovated, focussing on upgrades to the building insulation, windows and heating systems. Using rich survey data based on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) as well as administrative records of hospital admissions in Germany, we consistently show that housing weatherization upgrades sustainably reduce the demand for health care among the elderly sample of the population.

  PublisherDOI

• Timing Sustainable Engagement in Real Asset Investments

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

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Climate change and real estate: An introduction to the special issue

  Journal of Regional Science · 2024-08-26 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, putting tens of millions of real estate properties at significant physical and financial risk. A recent climate change assessment by the Biden administration estimates that extreme weather events cost the United States approximately $150 billion in direct damages annually (USGCRP, 2023).1 In addition to imposing a substantial welfare cost on property owners, mounting risks could threaten the stability of the property market, financial sector, and macroeconomy itself. At the same time, the real estate and building sector consumes around one-third of the world's energy annually and is responsible for a similar share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Given its volume, reducing emissions from the sector is central to achieving the pledged net-zero goals of nations. Real estate investors are increasingly putting sustainability at the center of their decision-making processes, given the close association between climate risk and real estate assets, both of which are location-based. In the meantime, more stringent building decarbonization regulations are putting pressure on real estate owners and investors, who must invest heavily to retrofit their buildings or pay “carbon penalties” and see their assets lose value. In recognition of the real estate sector's vulnerability and its contribution to climate change, the MIT Inaugural Climate and Real Estate Symposium was held on the MIT campus on December 4 and 5, 2022. Sponsored by the MIT Center for Real Estate, the conference brought together some of the leading experts on the interface of real estate markets and their reaction and adaptation to climate change. Academic, policy, and industry experts convened to listen to and discuss the leading research in this area. The Journal of Regional Science is pleased to publish this special issue, consisting of five papers from that conference. Edited by Juan Palacios of Maastricht University and MIT (assisted by Siqi Zheng and Ed Coulson), the papers have been vetted through the conference discussions as well as the journal's standard refereeing process. The contributors include some of the leading scholars in the area of sustainable real estate, and the papers represent a broad set of analyses on important issues in this field: Le (2024) sheds light on the dynamics of residential markets following Hurricane Sandy, and factors explaining the price recovery. The estimates show that remodeling expenditures are responsible for the return of prices to pre-storm levels, rather than changes in risk perception. In addition, the author documents an increase in flood insurance take-up rates in affected areas outside of floodplains after the hurricane. On the other hand, the increasing availability of green finance instruments offers a promising set of solutions to transform real estate into a more resilient and environmentally friendly industry. Devine and McCollum (2024) examine the impact of green finance on the propensity to adopt energy efficiency measures using one of the largest green bond programs to date in the United States. The authors highlight substantial challenges for investors when providing green financing. The results of their econometric analysis display substantial variation in the achieved efficiency of the real estate properties financed by the green bond program. In addition, the results suggest that ex-ante estimates of efficiency savings provided to prospective investors seem to be unrelated to the efficiency outcomes, hindering the ability of investors to form expectations about the expected carbon impact of their investments. The remaining three papers in this special issue concern the interface of commercial real estate and climate risks, which is a relatively neglected subject when compared to research on residential real estate. For instance, similar to the aforementioned paper, Holtermans, Niu, et al. (2023) study the impact of climate shocks on the commercial real estate sector, using an event-study approach to examine changes in prices before and after Hurricanes Harvey (Texas) and Sandy (New York). The authors find clear evidence of a decline in transaction prices in hurricane-damaged areas after the hurricanes, relative to unaffected areas. The adjustments in prices are more salient in locations considered at risk by official sources (i.e., outside FEMA floodplains), suggesting a strong link between belief updates and price corrections. This suggests that, unlike property owners in the residential market, affected areas do undergo a change in their risk perceptions in these areas. Two papers in the special issue discuss the impacts of climate change on debt and equity markets. Climate disasters may also disrupt businesses and their ability to repay loans. Holtermans, Kahn, et al. (2023) explore the changes in commercial mortgage payments after Hurricanes Harvey and Sandy. The results show that both hurricanes led to elevated levels of commercial mortgage delinquency. Ling et al. (2023) explore the transmission of climate risk from real estate to listed equity markets. The authors estimate that climate shocks to local property markets are associated with a 0.2–1.4 percentage point decrease in quarterly stock returns for publicly listed United States equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The effects are more pronounced in markets with a focus on climate change. Both papers suggests that debt and equity markets can be fragile when it comes to climate risk. This fragility can have spillovers to the broader economy, with serious impacts that might not be easily ameliorated. Collectively, these five papers form a valuable contribution to the study real estate and climate risk. More importantly, it is the hope of the special issue editors that they will stimulate further research into these issues and help the dissemination of research outcomes. This is critical to the cusses of our efforts to address climate challenges by supporting climate actions—both mitigation and adaptation interventions—in the real estate sector, the built environment and the entire economy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nils Kok

  Maastricht School of Management

  18 shared

• Steffen Künn

  University of Potsdam

  17 shared

• Siqi Zheng

  North China Electric Power University

  11 shared

• Piet Eichholtz

  11 shared

• Nico Pestel

  Maastricht University

  10 shared

• Jianghao Wang

  Chinese Academy of Sciences

  10 shared

• Yichun Fan

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  8 shared

• Nicolás Durán

  University College London

  8 shared

Labs

• MIT Center for Real EstatePI

Education

• Ph.D., Environmental Economics, Sustainable Real Estate, and Health Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)