New firms are a driving force of innovation and creative destruction, promoting social mobility and welfare creation. These result from the effort of entrepreneurial individuals who identify an opportunity, evaluate it, and create new organizations to exploit its business potential....

The first essay examines the relationship between publicly and privately traded commercial real estate and macroeconomic risk. To represent publicly traded real estate, I use exchange listed US Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), and to proxy for direct and privately traded real estate, I use...