Stuart A. Gabriel, PhD
Professor

Stuart A. Gabriel was recently named Director and Lusk Chair in Real Estate at the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate. He also serves as Professor of Finance and Business Economics, Policy, Planning, and Development in the Marshall School of Business and the School of Policy, Planning, and Development and as Co-Director of the USC Minority Program in Real Estate Finance and Development. During 1997 - 1999, Gabriel served as Deputy Dean of Academic Programs at the USC Marshall School of Business. His current research focuses on mortgage prepayment and default risk, urban housing and labor markets, population mobility and the quality-of-life, and rental housing market adjustment mechanisms. Gabriel has published extensively on these and other topics of real estate finance and urban and regional economics. Also, he has received a number of awards at USC for outstanding graduate teaching.

Gabriel serves on the editorial boards of Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Journal of Housing Research, and Housing Policy Debate. He also is a Director of the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable and the Los Angeles Community Design Center and a Fellow of the Homer Hoyt Institute for Advanced Real Estate Studies. Previously, he served as a Director of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. Outside the university, Gabriel has served as a consultant to numerous corporate entities and governmental agencies. Prior to joining the USC faculty, Gabriel served on the economics staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC and more recently has been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Gabriel holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yongheng Deng, PhD
Assistant Professor

Yongheng Deng is an assistant professor in the School of Policy, Planning and Development. He is a specialist in real estate economic and finance and an expert in modeling and quantitatively analyzing housing and mortgage markets and policy. His current research pertains mortgage terminations, borrower's unobserved heterogeneity, and the exercise of mortgage options, the impact of real estate ownership by non-real estate firms on firms returns, the employment access, residential location and homeownership, as well as the property market in China. He is also conducting a study regarding impacts of eliminating mortgage interest deduction on housing market funded by the Ford Foundation. He has published in Econometrica, Regional Science and Urban Economics, The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, and The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics - The Economics of Housing.

He previously served as an economist and expert at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) and was a post-doctorate research fellow at the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA and MS from Shanghai Maritime University in China and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Rena Sivitanidou, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Rena Sivitanidou is an associate professor at the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. She specializes in applied urban land and real estate economics, as well as real estate market research. Her research interests center on the relationships among markets within contemporary metropolitan areas; on the role of urban amenities and government regulations in shaping nonresidential real estate prices; and on the macro modeling of various real estate markets. Her most recent work focuses on office-commercial construction, office rent processes, and real estate and capital market influences on the office capitalization rate. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined USC's faculty in 1991.