Profile Information

Profile

Lily Shen is an Associate Professor of Real Estate Finance at Clemson University and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks. After witnessing the 2008 financial crisis, she dedicated her career to advancing real estate research aimed at fostering more resilient financial systems.
Leveraging her experience in Silicon Valley, she has been at the forefront of integrating AI into real estate teaching and research. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The Washington Post, and published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Management Science, and the Journal of Urban Economics.

Research Interests

• Fintech, Proptech, Real Estate, Mortgages, Machine Learning

Research Publications

• Double Trigger for Mortgage Default: the Fracking Boom, with Chris Cunningham and Kristopher Gerardi 2021 (Management Science)
• Information Value of Property Descriptions: A Machine Learning Approach with Stephen Ross 2021 (Journal of Urban Economics)
• Cleanliness is Next to Income: The Impact of COVID-19 on Short-Term Rentals with Sean Wilkoff, 2022 (Journal of Regional Science)
• –Featured by The Economist Dec. 2020
• Past Experiences and Investment Decisions: Evidence from Real Estate Markets with Brent Ambrose,2021(Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics)
• Economies of Scale and the Operating Efficiency of REITs: A Revisit, with Michael Highfield and Thomas Springer 2019 (Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics)
• The Odd One Out? The Impact of Property Uniqueness on Selling Time and Selling Price with Thomas M. Springer, 2022 (Forthcoming at the Journal of Housing Research)
• Information in Financial Contracts: Evidence from CMBS Pooling and Servicing Agreements with Ambrose, Han, and Korgaonkar 2023 (Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis)
• Landlord Rights, Evictions, and Rent Affordability with Edward Coulson and Thao Le, 2025
• The Good, the Bad and the Ordinary: Estimating Agency Value-Added using Real Estate Transactions with Chris Cunningham and Kristopher Gerardi, 2025
• Impact of High-Skill Jobs On Commercial Real Estate with Sumit Agarwal and Brent Ambrose, 2022
• The Role Agent Connectedness in Real Estate with Xiaojin Sun, 2025

Links

• The Economist Features My Research: Airbnb guests seek out cleaner properties in the pandemic
• Clemson study shows fracking resulted in lower mortgage defaults
• Clemson study employs AI to decipher ‘soft’ features of a home’s value
• Yelp ML Demo (TensorFlow)
• AI and ML in Finance Creative Inquiry