Bio
Ben Keys is the Rowan Family Foundation Professor of Real Estate and Finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He studies issues related to household finance, mortgage finance, real estate, applied econometrics, labor economics, and urban economics. Prior to joining the faculty of the Wharton School’s Department of Real Estate, Keys was an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and Co-Director of the Kreisman Initiative on Housing Law and Policy at the University of Chicago. Previously, he worked as a staff economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the Division of Research and Statistics.
Keys currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and sits on the editorial boards of Real Estate Economics and the Journal of Housing Economics. Keys is a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a member of the Academic Research Council of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
Keys’s research has been published in such journals as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies, among others. His work has been profiled in the Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post, among other publications.
Keys holds a B.A. in economics and political science from Swarthmore College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. Before graduate school, he worked at the Brookings Institution as a senior research assistant.