The Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to welcome Thomas Malone as the Pollman Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development for the 2017–2018 academic year.
Malone graduated from the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy this past year with a PhD in Urban Planning and Development. Prior to that, he earned an Master of Science in Economics from Tufts University, and a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Auckland.
Malone’s PhD dissertation, Essays on the Economics of Cities, examined the relationship between housing and business cycle at the metropolitan level, showing that a well-documented empirical regularity at the national level—the tendency of recessions and booms to be preceded by upturns and downturns in the housing market—is created by a handful of cities housing markets spilling over into other metropolitan areas economy’s. He is also working on research projects that investigate sample selection bias in the construction of house price indexes, and the prevalence of neighborhood change in U.S. cities over the last 40 years.
While at GSD, Malone plans to extend this research by working on projects that document and explain the diffusion of house price changes within cities. He will also study the connection between environmentally contaminated commercial real estate and economic growth in cities.
One of the seven fellowships and prizes administered by the GSD’s department of urban planning and design, the Pollman Fellowship was established in 2002 through a gift from Harold A. Pollman. The fellowship is given yearly to an outstanding post-doctoral graduate in real estate, urban planning, and development, who spends one year in residence at the GSD as a visiting scholar. Last year’s Pollman Fellow was ChengHe Guan (MDes ’12/DDes ’16).