UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Gilles Duranton, Dean’s Chair in Real Estate and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, will deliver the second annual and first in-person Austin J. Jaffe Real Estate Lecture at 10:30 a.m. Friday, March 25, in 126 Business Building.

“We are very excited to hold the first ‘in-person’ Austin Jaffe Memorial Lecture, which was created in 2020 to honor the memory of my colleague and good friend, Austin Jaffe,” Brent Ambrose, Jason and Julie Borrelli Faculty Chair in Real Estate and director of Smeal’s Institute for Real Estate Studies, said.

“The Austin Jaffe Real Estate Lecture series is sponsored by the generous gift from Austin’s wife Lynn, children Alex and Roxanne, and Austin’s friends. This year, we are honored to have Gilles Duranton from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business share his insights on urban economics and the growth of cities.”

Duranton is the co-editor of the Journal of Urban Economics, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Urban Economics Association. His lecture will navigate a paper he co-authored titled, “Urban Growth and its Aggregate Implications,” which develops an urban growth model at the intersection of urbanization and economics in heterogenous cities.

Prior to joining the Wharton School of Business in 2012, he taught at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics. He also previously served as the president of the Urban Economics Association and has received numerous awards for his research in urban and transportation economics.

Those interested in attending can register for the in-person event here.

The lecture series honors the late Austin Jaffe, who was the Philip H. Sieg Professor of Business Administration at the Smeal College of Business and served as the associate dean for international programs, the associate director of the Institute for Real Estate Studies, and chair of the Department of Risk Management before retiring after nearly 40 years at Penn State. Jaffe passed away in May 2019.

As a frontrunner in real estate studies, Jaffe’s legacy lives on in the lecture series — which brings renowned real estate scholars to Penn State to share their knowledge and navigate industry topics with students.

The annual event, which was made possible with the Jaffe’s family’s endowment, kicked off last year with speaker Abdullah Yavas, Robert E. Wangard Real Estate Chair at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.