Jefferson Duarte

Duarte is the Gerald D. Hines Professor of Real Estate Finance. He is an expert on several areas of asset pricing and real estate finance including option pricing, fixed income, and mortgage-backed securities (MBS). He has provided consulting services to several corporations such as Freddie Mac and BBVA. Duarte is a member of the Counselors of Real Estate.

Duarte has written papers on asset pricing, the term structure of interest rates, option pricing, and MBS. His research has received many awards including the prestigious Fama-DFA prize for the best asset pricing paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics. Prof. Duarte is a former associate editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and he often serves as a referee for academic journals. Duarte’s research has been published in the top journals of his field. His research has also been widely covered in U.S. and international media, including the following papers and magazines: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Reuters, Dow Jones Newswires, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, Barron’s and The Economist.

Prior to joining Rice University, Duarte was an associate professor at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington in Seattle. Currently teaching real estate finance and real estate development, Duarte has also taught Ph.D. and MBA level courses in option pricing models, term structure models, and risk management. Prior to joining academia, Duarte worked at the proprietary trading desk of JP Morgan Chase in New York as part of the group managing a multibillion dollar commercial mortgage-backed security (CMBS) portfolio.

Professor Duarte holds a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronautica (Brazil), and both an MBA and a Ph.D. in finance from the University of Chicago.

Teaching Interests: 

• Real estate finance
• Asset valuation
• Real estate development

Research Interests: 

• Empirical finance
• Derivatives
• Real estate finance