Biography
Dr. Shawn J. McCoy, who was born and raised in Las Vegas, NV, is the Director of the Lied Center for Real Estate in the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). At UNLV, he is responsible for leading the Lied Center’s agenda of excellence in teaching and forging strategic partnerships to bring together real estate researchers, students, and industry and community leaders. Dr. McCoy also conducts policy-oriented research addressing issues that affect the real estate industry and public policy.
Dr. McCoy, who received the distinction of Lincoln Institute Scholar from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, specializes in the fields of real estate and housing economics, applied econometrics, environmental economics, and geographic information systems. He publishes extensively in the world’s highest-ranking peer-reviewed journals in these fields including Real Estate Economics and the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. At the national scale, his research bridges applied econometrics with highly refined geospatial datasets to identify drivers of regional economic resilience. For instance, in a recent study, Dr. McCoy and his colleagues were the first to estimate the causal effect that increasing a city’s level of economic diversity has on improving a local real estate market’s ability to withstand the impact of and recover from an externally generated shock.
At the global scale, Dr. McCoy’s research focused international attention on the importance of monitoring the feedback loops between climate-related risks and residential housing markets as a means of fostering resilient cities. In this research area, Dr. McCoy has testified as an expert in real estate and global climate risks to governments and public agencies across 38 OECD participating countries.
Dr. McCoy’s published work is featured frequently in local, national, and international media outlets including The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, U.S. News and World Report, Bloomberg’s CITYLAB, inman, National Association of Realtors REALTOR Magazine, Builder, and Architect Magazine.
Dr. McCoy has taught or teaches undergraduate courses in real estate finance, mortgage banking, and applied geographic information systems, master’s level courses in statistics and econometrics, and applied microeconomics to graduate students in UNLV’s Executive MBA program. Dr. McCoy holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh.
Awards & Honors
Lincoln Institute Scholar
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
Aug 2018
