This study investigates why externally advised Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) underperform their internally managed counterparts. Consistent with previous studies, we find that REITs managed by external advisors underperform internally managed ones by over 7% per year. Property-level cash...

We explore the role of expected cash flow volatility as a determinant of dividend policy both theoretically and empirically. Our simple one period model demonstrates that, given the existence of a stock-price penalty associated with dividend cuts, managers rationally pay out lower levels of...

This research assesses the impact of income and property taxes on house prices using a decadal panel data set for 63 metropolitan areas from 1970 to 1990. Our evidence is consistent with full capitalization of marginal income tax rates into house prices. Full capitalization suggests that income...

This study documents the wide deviations of securitized real estate assets in equity REITs from the value of the underlying commercial properties. The net asset value of REITs is estimated and used to investigate the sources of premiums/discounts from net asset value in a large sample of equity...

Drawing from a large mortgage loan database and an extensive panel data set on metropolitan areas, this study refines the contingent claims model of default. Recent research has treated default as optimal exercise of a put option and has emphasized loan to value ratios, loan age and interest...

In this study, we explore the role of expected cash flow volatility as a determinant of dividend policy. We first demonstrate that returns are increasing in dividend payout. But, we show that responses to changes in dividends are less sensitive to the magnitude of the change than to the sign of...

A firm can be viewed as a portfolio of projects arising from capital budgeting decisions. How these projects are bundled, i.e. managerial style, affects administrative costs and firm value. We analyze the effect of style on firm value using a panel data set of 75 publicly-traded REITs over eight...

This paper studies expectations of capital appreciation in the housing market. We show that expectations impounded in rent-to-price ratio at the beginning of the decade successfully predict appreciation rates, but only if we first control for fluctuations within a transactions and information...

We explore the dynamics of real house prices by estimating serial correlation and mean reversion coefficients from a panel data set of 62 metro areas from 1979-1995. The serial correlation and reversion parameters are then shown to vary cross sectionally with city size, real income growth,...

This paper studies expectations of capital appreciation in the housing market. We show that expectations impounded in the rent/price ratio at the beginning of the decade successfully predict appreciation rates, but only if we first control for cross-sectional differences in the quality of rental...