Smeal Professor Brent Ambrose Wins Best Paper Award

Brent W. Ambrose, Smeal Professor of Real Estate and Director of the Institute for Real Estate Studies at the Penn State Smeal College of Business, received the 2012 Edwin S. Mills Best Paper Award for a paper demonstrating a new way to price mortgage contracts.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (January 15, 2013) -- Brent W. Ambrose, Smeal Professor of Real Estate and Director of the Institute for Real Estate Studies at the Penn State Smeal College of Business, received the 2012 Edwin S. Mills Best Paper Award from the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

The award honors the best paper published in the Real Estate Economics journal in 2012 and was presented at the Allied Social Science Association meeting earlier this month.

The paper, “The Adjustable Balance Mortgage: Reducing the Value of the Put,” was co-authored by Richard J. Buttimer, Jr., associate dean for faculty and research and professor of finance at the Belk College of Business at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Ambrose and Buttimer demonstrate a way to price new mortgage contracts so that property value risk shifts from the borrower to the lender. Authors show that this could reduce financial incentive for default based on negative equity. Read a more in-depth summary at Research with Impact: Resetting the Balance.

Ambrose, who joined the Smeal faculty in 2006, also serves as director of Ph.D. programs. His expertise is in fixed income securities, corporate finance, and real estate finance. He holds a Ph.D. in real estate and an MBA in finance from the University of Georgia and a B.S. in business from Wake Forest University.

REPORTERS & EDITORS: For more information, please contact Victoria Fryer in the Smeal College of Business Media Relations Office at 814-863-3798 or mediarelations@smeal.psu.edu.

Penn State's Smeal College of Business offers highly ranked undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, Ph.D., and executive education opportunities to more than 5,500 students at all levels. Featuring academic departments of accounting, finance, management and organization, marketing, risk management, and supply chain and information systems, the college is also home to major research centers such as the Center for Supply Chain Research, the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Global Business Studies, and the Center for the Management of Technological and Organizational Change.