I am Helen Bao — Professor of Urban Economics and Public Policy in the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. I serve as Deputy Head of Department, Director of the Lab for Interdisciplinary Spatial Analysis, Director of International Relations, and Academic Project Director for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. I am a Fellow of Newnham College.
My research applies behavioural economics, field experiments, and computational methods to questions about housing markets, urban regulation, and the unequal distribution of urban opportunity. The questions cluster around three things I find interesting: how people actually make housing decisions (rather than how textbooks predict they will), how institutional and regulatory environments produce or correct unequal outcomes, and how new data sources let us measure both at the scale at which they actually operate.
Current research
Two major projects anchor my current work:
- Housing discrimination and inequality — multi-country correspondence-test evidence on how landlords, agents, and platforms screen applicants by race, ethnicity, and foreignness, and the policy interventions that can shift these patterns.
- Spatial personality — population-scale inference of psychological traits from digital traces, and how these traits aggregate to shape regional outcomes in entrepreneurship, wellbeing, voting, and resilience.
A signature line running for over a decade is the behavioural economics of housing decisions — reference dependence, loss aversion, and endowment effects applied to homebuyers, renters, and investors. A newer direction applies AI and computational methods to spatial-analytic questions that could not have been asked five years ago.
See the Research page for fuller descriptions, the Publications page for the full corpus, and the Working papers page for current preprints.
Recent
- Under review at the Journal of Urban Economics (2026): “Race, symbolic stigma and foreignness: decomposing the housing-discrimination penalty”.
- 2025: Behavioural Economic Analysis of Institutional Changes: Lessons learned from China’s Land System Reforms (Routledge, with Lei Feng).
- Active: The Lab for Interdisciplinary Spatial Analysis launched in 2024, bringing together researchers across Land Economy, Computer Science, and applied psychology.
Contact
Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge
17 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RX, United Kingdom
Email: hxb20@cam.ac.uk
Phone: +44 (0)1223 337 116
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