Dwight Jaffee, a real estate and finance professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, died Jan. 28 at the age of 72.

Remembered for his inquisitive nature and dedication to research, Jaffee was a Willis Booth Professor of Banking, Finance and Real Estate, as well as a member of the Finance Group at Haas. He was also highly lauded for his work as co-chair at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics.

After an extended tenure as an economics professor at Princeton University, Jaffee joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1991, where his research has focused on areas such as mortgage markets, banking and catastrophe insurance.

“Dwight was a superb applied econometrician and real estate finance expert,” said Daniel Rubinfeld, the Robert L. Bridges Professor Emeritus of Law and a campus professor emeritus of economics.

As part of his recent work, Jaffee advocated the privatization of the residential mortgage market by suggesting lessening the roles of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Haoyang Liu, a research fellow at the Fisher Center who worked with Jaffee.

Cynthia Kroll, a former executive director at the Fisher Center, noted that Jaffee had a thirst for understanding things and ensuring that whatever argument he read was correct. He encouraged her to think critically about the projects she was pursuing, Kroll added.

“He was someone who didn’t go out to challenge conventional wisdom just for the sake of challenging it, but wouldn’t accept things until he could understand and believe that it was true,” Kroll said.

Jaffee was respected by his students because of his ability to ask sharp and insightful questions, thereby making each student’s paper better than it was before, Liu noted.

His wife, Lynne Heinrich — a lecturer and advisory board member of the Center for Social Sector Leadership at Haas — said Jaffee was a senior member of the Fisher Center, always eager to help and contribute to administrative work, teaching and research. He often collaborated closely with his students to ensure their academic success, Heinrich added.

Jaffee helped author more than 100 articles and seven books, including “The Impact of Globalization in a High-Tech Economy” and “The Oxford Handbook of Offshoring and Global Employment.”

“He was just an enormously happy and joyful soul,” Heinrich said. “He had no bucket list in life because he lived his life to the fullest.”

Jaffee is survived by his wife, Lynne; his mother, Gertrude; his children, Betsy and Jonathan; and his two grandchildren.

Contact Jennifer Kang at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @jenni_kang.