Christopher Severen

Christopher Severen
  • Adjunct Assistant Professor of Real Estate

Contact Information

  • office Address:

    Dinan Hall, 4th Floor
    3733 Spruce Street
    Philadelphia, PA 19104-6301

Links: Personal Website

Overview

Christopher Severen is an Economic Advisor and Economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. His research spans urban, environmental, and development economics. He completed his PhD in 2017 at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Before graduate school, he worked for an energy efficiency consulting firm in Austin, TX. During his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in Latin American Studies (LLILAS) and Economics, he produced documentaries about social issues in Thailand and Paraguay.

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Teaching

Past Courses

  • REAL9440 - QSM for Urban Economics

    This course will cover quantitative spatial models (QSMs) as used in urban and real estate economics and related disciplines. We will critically explore QSMs both as tools for measurement and as economic frameworks for evaluating welfare and simulating counterfactuals of spatial economies. We will discuss approaches to QSM estimation, as well as data requirements, identifying assumptions, and the consequences thereof. The purpose of this course is to give students a broad understanding of QSMs and their common use cases, while providing a sense of the circumstances and assumptions under which these models permit credible analysis. We may explore applications of QSMs to a variety of economic topics: infrastructure, transit, congestion, land use, migration, path dependence, economic history, the geography of consumption, household economics, environmental economics, climate change.

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The Decline of the Cover Letter in the AI Era

Wharton professor of business economics and public policy discusses how artificial intelligence is weakening the value of cover letters and reshaping hiring signals.…Read More

Knowledge @ Wharton - 2026/03/6
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