Using the actual quarterly rental income generated in the years between 2001 and 2010 by over 9,000 NCREIF commercial properties, we construct a commercial real estate rental index and estimate the time series properties (e.g., mean-reversion speed and volatility) of market-wide rental growth...

Motivated by a debate on the effect of debt on firms' product market performance, I examine the effect of lines of credit on firms' future profits. Consistent with the notion that lines of credit provide firms with unique financial flexibility and enhance their strategic position within the...

Buyers’ onsite viewing activities reveal important information about their housing demands, yet empirically we know little about their impact on transaction outcomes. Using a unique proprietary dataset which includes 4,397,652 onsite viewing records and 621,040 transaction outcomes from the...

Using a large sample of firms from 43 markets, we find significant time-series variations in firms’ leverage ratios around the world. Industry median leverage ratios and aggregate leverage ratios also change substantially over time. Relative to actual leverage ratios, target leverage ratios...

Using daily hedonic housing price index for five Australian capital cities, we document a negative relationship between prior COVID-19 cases and daily housing returns. Specifically, the daily housing return drops by 0.35 basis points or 1.26 percentage points annually for every doubling of newly...

This study examines the externality of anti-speculation policies and its impact on property market volatility. Employing a rich dataset on property transactions in Hong Kong from 1991 to 2020, we find that, given regulations for flippers in the presale residential property market only, the...

This paper examines the effect of mainland Chinese buyers' housing purchase in Hong Kong. Contrary to media's allegation on mainland buyers causing huge bubbles in Hong Kong housing market, we find that mainland buyers only constitute less than 4% of housing transactions in Hong Kong from 2001...

How pervasive is the use of cryptocurrencies to evade capital controls? We develop a new method that exploits blockchain data to identify cross-border flows that circumvent controls via cryptocurrencies. Applying the method to China, we find that capital flight volume is over one-quarter of...

This study documents that over 10% of the presale contracts in the Hong Kong housing market between 1996 and 2014 were rescinded, resulting in a loss of HKD 436.67 million per year. We then investigate potential determinants of contracts rescission from a novel perspective of option theory. We...