Fund Flows and Commercial Real Estate Investment: Evidence from the Commercial Mortgage Market

This paper addresses the issue of the impact of fund flows on real investment. In the classical world, fund flows affect investment by changing the cost of funds or through the weighted average cost of capital. In a less perfect world, fund flows can directly alter investment though a rationing mechanism, where even presumably profitable investment is choked off. This paper examines the commercial mortgage market over the last quarter century. The findings indicate an effect of constrained flows on investment in the early 1990s, but an independent impact of higher flows to the commercial mortgage market in the middle 1980s is not found.