Research areas
- Commercial real estate asset pricing
- Term structure of interest rates and monetary policy
- Joint estimation of macroeconomic and asset pricing models
- Risk factor identification using information from prices and derivatives
- Long-run risk and continuation-value computations for regime-switching VARs
- commercial-real-estate-pricing-regimes
- markov-switching-term-structure-models
Key papers
- leather-sagi-markov-switching-cre-asset-pricing — co-author on the central paper of the project: a Markov-switching rational expectations CRE asset pricing model jointly estimated against treasury yields and CRE cap rates and NOI growth.
- riccati-equations-leather-sagi — internal derivation of the Riccati recursions for the regime-switching CRE model. Section 6 (long-run variance for the unconditional continuation value) is explicitly attributed to working notes by J. Sagi.
- leather-sagi-constrained-optimization-benchmark-54d — 2026 co-authored technical note casting the CRE estimation task as a 54-D constrained stochastic optimization benchmark for external optimization research.
- design-brief-global-optimization-pipeline — 2026-04-10 internal design brief for the global optimization pipeline (PI role).
- synthesis-final-day-sprint-decisions — 2026-04-12 synthesis memo closing Exp 10/11/12 (PI role).
Recent work
- Co-author of the Leather–Sagi CRE asset pricing paper with David Leather (Chapman University).
- Working notes on closed-form long-run variance for regime-switching VARs,
used as the analytic foundation for the dividend-strip continuation value
Q_j^*. - Earlier work (Chiang–Hughen–Sagi 2015, “Estimating oil risk factors using information from equity and derivatives markets”) provides the methodological precedent that joint estimation across multiple asset classes can sharpen factor identification at the cost of pricing-error erosion on any single asset class — the same trade-off the central paper documents when adding CRE prices to a TSM-only baseline.
Collaborators
- david-leather (Chapman University) — lead author on the central Markov-switching CRE asset pricing paper and contributor to the Riccati / no-bubble derivation.
- I-Hsuan Ethan Chiang, William K. Hughen — co-authors on the 2015 oil pricing paper (referenced as an instance of the same identification trade-off).
My notes
Jacob Sagi is the second author of the project’s central paper. The “fit erodes when more assets are added to the joint estimation” observation (referenced explicitly in the central paper as the standard pattern from Chiang–Hughen–Sagi 2015) is one of his earlier methodological contributions and frames how the central paper interprets the trade-off between treasury pricing accuracy and the CRE-driven gain in monetary-policy regime identification.
His contribution to the Riccati derivation note is concentrated in Section 6,
where the closed-form long-run variance for δ' x_t under the regime-switching
VAR is derived via stacking the first-moment recursion into the 3S × 3S
total persistence matrix K and exploiting the identity Π^U (Π − Π^U) = 0
to handle the singular (I − Π). This long-run variance is the building
block for both the cumulant form of the no-bubble condition and for the
unconditional dividend strip values used in the continuation Q_j^*.