Real estate markets are periodically plagued by excess supply, rent concessions and few arms-length transactions. During such periods, valuation is problematic. The model presented here requires the forecasts of future vacancy rates, and equilibrium and actual rental rates. Vacancy rate...

Commercial real estate plays a key role in determining the urban sustainability of a metropolitan area. While the residential sector has been the primary focus of energy policies, commercial buildings are now responsible for most of the durable building stock's total electricity consumption....

California's per-capita electricity consumption is 50 percent lower than national per-capita consumption. Mild climate, deindustrialization, and its demographics explain part of this differential. California energy efficiency policy is often claimed to be another key factor. A challenge in...

Recent sharp declines in owner-occupied housing prices naturally raise the question of whether something similar will happen to income-producing properties. It already has based on the nearly 60% decline in the share prices of publicly-traded, commercial property firms from their peak in early...

Periodic sharp sustained increases and then reversals in asset prices lead many to posit irrational price bubbles. The general case for irrationality is that real asset prices simply have moved too much given the future real cash flows the assets are reasonably likely to produce. A corollary for...

We develop a model of informal financial networks and present corroborating evidence by studying the role of professional property brokers in the U.S. commercial real estate market. Our model demonstrates how service intermediaries, who do not supply finance themselves, can facilitate their...

This paper studies the role of asymmetric information in commercial real estate markets in the U.S. We propose a novel and exogenous measure of information based on the quality of property tax assessments in different regions. Employing direct and indirect information variables, we find strong...

Managers make different decisions in countries with poor protection of investor rights and poor financial development. One possible explanation is that shareholder-wealth maximizing managers face different tradeoffs in such countries (the tradeoff theory). Alternatively, firms in such countries...

This paper provides firm-level evidence that credit constraints restrict international trade flows and affect the sectoral pattern of multinational activity. Using detailed customs data from China, we show that foreign affiliates and joint ventures have better export performance than private...

Classic Big Push industrialization envisions state planners coordinating economic activity to internalize a range of externalities that otherwise lock in a low-income equilibrium, but runs afoul of well-known government failure problems. Successful Big Push coordination may occur instead when a...