This article reviews the empirical risk and return statistics from physical real estate and financial real estate investments made in the U.S. over the period 1972-1999. It includes income, capital appreciation, and total returns from business, residential, and farm real estate, as well as REIT...

common explanation for why firms incur sunk costs is that technology considerations make them inescapable. This paper shows that sometimes firms may prefer to make early (less informed) investment decisions even when technology allows such decisions to be delayed. Sunk costs commit and clarify a...

In the face of uncertainty, firms often place a premium on flexibility. By keeping their options open, firms are able to adjust decisions as uncertainty is resolved. Valuing this benefit of flexible projects is the focus of the real options approach to capital budgeting. This paper presents an...

Governments and vocal institutional shareholders have been exerting pressure on companies they deem to have objectionable operations (such as tobacco or chemical producers). This paper studies the effect of the most important legislative and shareholder boycott to date, the boycott of the South...

This paper develops a real-time structural model of price formation, and uses it to investigate the dynamics of effective quotes and bid-ask spreads between consecutive trades. There is some evidence that the effective bid-ask spreads increase over time when no orders arrive. The effective...

Substantial progress has been made in extending the Black-Scholes model to incorporate such features as stochastic volatility, stochastic interest rates and jumps.On the empirical front, however, it is not yet known whether and by how much each generalized feature will improve option pricing and...

Arguments for creating a market to allow trading the portfolio of all endowments in the entire world, the "market portfolio," are considered. This world share market would represent a radical innovation, since at the present time only a small fraction of world endowments are traded. Using a...

Substantial progress has been made in extending the Black- Scholes model to incorporate such features as stochastic volatility, stochastic interest rates and jumps. On the empirical front, however, it is not yet known whether and by how much each generalized feature will improve option pricing...

In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic...