Faculty Profile

	Maisy Wong

Maisy Wong joined the Wharton Real Estate Department faculty this year as an assistant professor of real estate, having received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She'll teach real estate finance in the spring. Her research interests are international in scope, including real estate economics, public economics, and development economics. She reports that her current project is on "the welfare consequences of residential desegregation policies, discrete choice and hedonic estimation of preferences, seasonality, and consumption smoothing in Indonesia."

Prof. Wong chose to begin her teaching career in Wharton's Real Estate Program "because of the quality of the program in terms of my colleagues and the students. The Real Estate Center also provides strong support both financially and in terms of its distinguished network. Less than a month upon arriving on campus, I have no doubt that I made the right choice. Being the most junior faculty in the group, I have benefited tremendously from the advice of my senior colleagues. After just two weeks on campus, many faculty members have already offered to meet me for lunch/coffee. Everyone has made me feel like there is no question that is too trivial for an assistant professor to ask. Compared to fellow graduate students from MIT who are also starting as assistant professors, the support I have received has been phenomenal. I am confident that this is an environment I can be productive in."

This past semester, Wong taught two undergraduate sections of Real Estate Finance. She says she was "very impressed with the intellect of the students and the quality of participation in class. The students were particularly interested in learning about recent challenges facing the real estate industry. Several students actively shared newspaper articles related to topics discussed in class. Although teaching a new class for the first time is challenging, the enthusiasm the students brought to class made all the hard work worth it!"