William C. Wheaton

About

William C. Wheaton is a Post-tenure Professor of Economics at MIT, holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Economics and the Center for Real Estate. He has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1972 and helped to develop the field of urban economics by pioneering the theory of how land, location, and housing markets jointly operate. His expertise includes urban infrastructure and local government finance. Professor Wheaton is an authority on regional economics and is a principal in a consulting firm that provides market analyses for development companies active in the commercial space market. He has actively applied economic research to the real estate industry, helped organize the MIT Center for Real Estate, and taught its core course in Real Estate Economics for over 30 years. He was the first economist to apply econometric methods to the forecasting of real estate markets and is a principal in Torto Wheaton Research, a globally-recognized real estate consulting firm. He received a B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Over the years, he has collaborated with many US governmental agencies, the World Bank, and the United Nations, and has served on planning commissions in various towns where he has lived.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Virology
• Economic geography
• Computer Security
• Financial economics
• Archaeology
• Regional science
• Economics

Selected publications

• What Determined the Great Cap Rate Compression of 2000–2007, and the Dramatic Reversal During the 2008–2009 Financial Crisis?

  The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics · 2011-08-01 · 87 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Secular and Cyclic Determinants of Capitalization Rates:<i>The Role of Property Fundamentals, Macroeconomic Factors, and “Structural Changes”</i>

  The Journal of Portfolio Management · 2009-09-30 · 48 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this article, the authors revisit many studies that have attempted to explain the determinants of real estate capitalization rates. Two new innovations are introduced. First, the authors identify two macroeconomic factors, in addition to risk-free Treasury rates, that greatly impact cap rates—the general corporate risk premium operating in the economy and the amount of debt (liquidity) available. The addition of these factors greatly adds to the ability of previous models to explain the secul…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Geography of COVID-19 growth in the US: Counties and Metropolitan Areas

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020 · 43 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 100 Years of Commercial Real Estate Prices in Manhattan

  Real Estate Economics · 2009-02-19 · 38 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article is able to put together a database of 86 repeat‐sales transactions for office properties in lower and midtown Manhattan spanning the years from 1899 to 1999. Using this very limited database, decade‐interval changes in real property prices are estimated—with varying degrees of precision. Our conclusions are two fold. First, adjusting for inflation, commercial office property values were 30% lower in 1999 than they were in 1899. Second, within any decade values often rise and fall by…

  PublisherDOI

• Do House Price Levels Anticipate Subsequent Price Changes within Metropolitan Areas?

  Real Estate Economics · 2015-07-23 · 19 citations

  articleSenior author

  This research examines the relationship between hedonically controlled housing price levels and subsequent changes in those prices across locations within MSAs. Are areas with a high price relative to an “imputed rent” paying for higher appreciation? In an efficient market ( e.g ., Gordon Growth Model), as fundamentals (impute rent) differ across locations and change over time, anticipation of these should generate a positive correlation between (residual) price levels and subsequent price chang…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Denise DiPasquale

  Battery Park

  13 shared

• Raymond G. Torto

  13 shared

• Serguei Chervachidze

  10 shared

• Tracey Seslen

  University of Washington

  8 shared

• Nai Jia Lee

  National University of Singapore

  5 shared

• Gleb Nechayev

  Healthcentric Advisors

  4 shared

• James Costello

  Healthcentric Advisors

  3 shared

• Mark S. Baranski

  3 shared

Labs

• Urban Economics LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Urban Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1972

Similar researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Kairos Shenh-56
• Siqi Zhengh-48
• Albert Saizh-27