Research Profile: Chandler Lutz

Chandler Lutz studies housing markets, labor economics and monetary policy, using econometric, statistical and machine learning methods. He is an associate professor of finance and the Steven Ott Distinguished Scholar in Real Estate in the Belk College of Business. He also is a research fellow at the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate.

Lutz’s research has been published in journals including Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics. In recent work, a paper published in the Journal of Urban Economics studied how mortgage innovation can cause a housing boom even within a robust regulatory framework and strictly enforced recourse borrowing. The results are relevant in the many countries where interest-only loans play a sizable role in mortgage finance.

Notably, Lutz has developed new datasets that measure the amount of land unavailable for housing construction across the United States. Using high-resolution satellite imagery and modern machine-learning methods, the research team constructed novel datasets that capture the geographic determinants of U.S. housing supply. Their measure is a markedly more accurate house price predictor than currently used measures.

He also causally assessed the impact of interest rate declines on distressed borrowers. Lutz joined the Belk College following a nationwide search for a nationally recognized expert in real estate, particularly in policy. Prior to joining Charlotte’s faculty, Lutz was a financial economist with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a faculty member with Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

While at the SEC, Lutz’s policy work spanned housing markets, financial risk, and macroeconomic analysis; he was the recipient of the SEC Best Economic Research Award. He also conducted policy research on U.S. credit markets interconnectedness and the effects of the economic shock of COVID-19.