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We provide a comprehensive examination of the return performance of closed-end, private equity real estate (PERE) funds relative to the performance of listed real estate stocks (real estate investment trusts [REITs]) and the NCREIF ODCE fund index. We first match each PERE fund in our sample and its realized internal rate of return and equity multiple with the return that would have been earned by an LP investor on an investment in the designated benchmark over each fund’s investment horizon. Overall, we find that closed-end PERE funds have underperformed listed REITs. In contrast, we find similar overall performance between PERE and the NCREIF ODCE fund index. We also examine the determinants of the relative performance spread between the PERE funds and the equity REIT index and find that the spread widens with interest rate environment variables (Treasury yields and default spreads) and narrows with broad macroeconomic performance indicators (growth rate of GDP). TOPICS:Real assets/alternative investments/private equity, real estate, private equity, exchange-traded funds and applications, performance measurement Key Findings ▪ Closed-end PERE funds underperform listed REITs—both on average and by the percentages of individual funds. ▪ The performance spread widens with interest rate environment variables (Treasury yields and default spreads) and narrows with broad macroeconomic performance indicators (growth rate of GDP). ▪ The overall performance between PERE and the NCREIF ODCE fund index is similar.

We show that endogenous information signaling in the CDS market, together with sluggish updates on corporate credit ratings assigned by major rating agencies, creates anomalies such as return momentum within the CDS market and across CDS-to-stock return momentum. Using 5-year credit default swap (CDS) contracts on 1,247 U.S. firms from 2003 to 2011, a three-month formation and one-month holding period CDS momentum strategy yields 52 bps per month with a Sharpe ratio of 0.423. The performance is better for entities with lower credit ratings (83 bps per month), high CDS depth (80 bps per month), and during the financial crisis (97 bps per month). Furthermore, our cross-market tests show that by incorporating past CDS returns into the stock momentum portfolio formation process, traditional stock momentum strategies avoid abrupt losses during the crisis period and improve their performance by a net of 104 bps per month. This joint-market momentum strategy is particularly profitable for entities with high CDS depth. Importantly, we show that both within the CDS market and CDS-to-stock joint-market, momentum profits exist because CDS returns correctly anticipate future credit rating changes. This mechanism completely differentiates CDS momentum from bond return momentum.

Using performance data through the fourth quarter of 2017 on 467 funds that came to market between 2000 and 2013, the authors of this article first examine the unconditional performance of closed-end, private equity real estate (PERE) funds over time and across various fund characteristics. The performance metrics they use are the internal rate of return, the multiple on invested capital, and a proxy for the public market equivalent. Using conditional sorts, as well as regression procedures with asset pricing specifications, the authors estimate the exposure of PERE performance to fund-level characteristics and macroeconomic environment risk factors and find that both significantly affect PERE performance. More specifically, they find that PERE performance is positively related to fund size, gross domestic product growth changes, private market real estate returns, interest rate changes, and default spread changes and is negatively related to vintage volume. International funds dramatically underperformed relative to domestic funds during our sample period. The authors also find that fund performance is positively associated with the performance of prior funds raised by the same PERE firm. TOPICS:Statistical methods, real estate, risk management, private equity Key Findings • Fund characteristics, market risks, and macroeconomic risk factors significantly predict PERE performance. • Fund performance is positively associated with the performance of prior funds raised by the same PERE sponsor. • Fund performance is negatively associated with vintage volume.

This study examines the relationship between corporate internationalization and the cost of equity capital. We find that international diversification reduces the cost of equity. The diversification benefits are particularly strong during the 2008 financial crisis and for financially constrained firms. We also find that market-specific factors serve as important channels through which the corporate internationalization effects amplify or attenuate. Overall, our study provides support for theories that multinational companies perform valuable diversification functions to investors in a world with segmented and imperfect financial markets.

We find that credit default swap (CDS) spreads contribute significantly to price discovery in financial markets when firm-specific credit information is prominent. Using 3,470 S&P rating notch and watch changes for US public and private entities from 2001–2013, we show that CDS prices contain unique firm credit risk information that is not captured by the prices of other related securities such as stocks and bonds of the same firm. Credit information unidirectionally flows from CDS to bonds, particularly for private entities whose stocks are not concurrently trading in markets. We further find that CDS returns significantly predict stock returns, particularly their idiosyncratic components.

This study examines the sensitivity of equity REIT returns to time‐varying MSA allocations of REIT property portfolios. Using a large sample of individual commercial property holdings, we find significant cross‐sectional and time variation in REIT geographic exposures and the ability of these exposures to explain the cross‐section of REIT returns. We further find evidence consistent with REIT managers being able, on average, to time allocation decisions ahead of MSA outperformance. This effect is most prevalent in non‐gateway markets, varies significantly across MSAs and over time, and is concentrated in financially flexible firms with a more diversified geographic portfolio.

In this article, the authors investigate the performance sensitivity of private equity real estate (PERE) funds to capital deployment speeds, investment horizons, management fees, and investor opportunity costs from uncalled capital. The authors first provide a series of simulation scenarios demonstrating the significant effects of these factors on PERE performance and then use PERE fund data to empirically investigate their performance effects. Using a comprehensive dataset from Cambridge Associates covering a large sample of 497 funds sponsored by 201 managers with aggregate assets under management of $383.9 billion from 2000–2013, the authors find that capital deployment speeds vary significantly across funds and over time and that very little of this variation is incorporated in traditional performance metrics. Importantly, the dilutive effects of management fees are positively related to the time over which capital is deployed and negatively related to the percentage of net capital called from investors and deployed by the fund manager. The authors also model the significant opportunity cost investors incur when reserving funds for uncertain capital calls. This cost of maintaining dry powder for the manager is ignored in reported performance metrics. Taken together, the authors’ results show the importance of accounting for capital deployment speeds, investment horizons, management fees, and uncalled capital in determining PERE fund performance.

This article examines U.S. REIT leverage decisions and their effects on risk and return. We find that the speed at which REITs close the gap between current debt levels and target leverage levels is 17% annually. REITs that are highly levered relative to the average REIT tend to underperform REITs with less debt in their capital structure. However, REITs that are highly levered relative to their target leverage tend to perform better on a risk-adjusted basis than under-levered REITs. Taken together, our results show that REIT leverage has significant return performance effects conditional on deviations from target leverage.

This paper examines the effects of geographic portfolio concentrations on the return performance of U.S. public REITs versus private commercial real estate over the 1996–2013 time period. We document significant cross-sectional and temporal differences in the geographic concentration of property holdings across exchange-listed public and private real estate markets. Adjusting private market returns for differences in geographic concentrations with public markets, we find that core private market performance falls. This performance drop arises primarily from lower geographically adjusted retail performance. In contrast, geographically adjusted industrial and office property performance rises slightly while apartment performance remains relatively unchanged. Using return performance attribution analysis, we find that the geographic allocation effect constitutes only a small portion of the total return difference between listed and private market returns, whereas individual property selection within geographic locations explains, in part, the documented outperformance of listed versus private real estate market returns. This result also suggests the decision to allocate to a geographic location is relatively less important than the manager's ability to select and manage properties within that location. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

In many markets, buyers, sellers, and their agents have differential information about the quality of heterogeneous assets. We study negotiated transaction prices in the commercial real estate market, which is characterized by heterogeneous assets, illiquidity, and highly segmented local markets, all of which increase the importance of asymmetric information in negotiated pricing outcomes. Using 114,588 industrial, multi-family and office sale transactions that occurred during 1997–2011, we document that distant commercial real estate buyers pay, on average, premiums of 4 % to 15 % relative to local buyers, controlling for individual property characteristics as well as time fixed-effects. We also examine the extent to which the sources of these observed premiums are a product of higher search costs/information asymmetry problems associated with distance (search cost channel) or a result of reference-dependence preference/anchoring based on the price levels in the investors’ local market (behavioral biases channel). Our results suggest the observed price premiums are explained by distant investors who face higher search costs and are at an information disadvantage compared to investors located in closer proximity to the property. In contrast, anchoring plays a more muted role in explaining observed premiums. The use of an intermediary (broker) increases, on average, the acquisition prices of buyers and decreases the disposition prices of sellers by 3 % to 8 %. This result is consistent with the incentive real estate agents have to convince sellers to dispose of their properties too quickly and to convince buyers to search less and therefore pay higher prices.

Using five-year credit default swap (CDS) spreads on 2,364 companies in 54 countries from 2004 to 2011, we find that firms exposed to stronger property rights through their foreign asset positions (institutional channel) and firms cross-listed on exchanges with stricter disclosure requirements (informational channel) reduce their CDS spreads by 40 bps for a one-standard-deviation increase in their exposure to the two channels. These channels capture effects beyond those associated with firm- and country-level fundamentals. Overall, we find that firm-level global asset and information connections are important mechanisms to delink firms from their sovereign and country risks.

This study examines cloud computing spot pricing dynamics and the influence of latency on those pricing dynamics. Using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud U.S. East and West market spot instance pricing and latency intraday data from April 9, 2010, to May 22, 2011, we find considerable time variation in spot instance prices, and prices are often persistently higher in the West. Bivariate vector autoregressive model results show that within-market autoregressive pricing effects are larger than across-market effects. We also document that over 70% of the relative price discovery occurs in the East market. Our regression results further show that East–West latency differentials have a significantly positive effect on East–West pricing differentials. Latency creates a dynamic pricing wedge that widens or narrows conditional on the latency differentials. Using an error correction model, the speed of adjustment from long-run pricing convergence errors causes the short-run price differential to narrow, but the adjustment does not completely offset the price differential.

espanolObjetivos: El objetivo del estudio fue analizar el empleo de bisfosfonatos en mujeres con artritis reumatoide (AR) de las Islas Canarias. Material y metodos: Estudio observacional multicentrico en el que se incluyeron mujeres con una edad igual o superior a 50 anos. En una unica visita se recogieron variables demograficas y de la AR, antecedente de fractura por fragilidad, uso de corticoides, realizacion de densitometria osea (DXA) y tratamiento actual con bisfosfonatos. Se empleo una herramienta FRAX® simplificada y se aplico la recomendacion de profilaxis de osteoporosis por corticoides del American College of Rheumatology (ACR). Resultados: Se incluyeron 192 mujeres con edad promedio de 62 anos. Un total de 91 (48%) pacientes recibian corticoides; 17 de ellas (9%) habian sufrido fractura; a 123 se les habia realizado DXA (66%); y 52 (28%) tomaban bisfosfonatos (el 70% de las pacientes con osteoporosis o fractura y el 45% de aque- llas con criterios de profilaxis de osteoporosis por corticoides). Los factores asociados de manera significativa con el empleo de bisfosfonatos fueron la edad, la duracion de la enfermedad, el cuestionario de capacidad funcional HAQ, el riesgo de fractura determinado por FRAX®, el tratamiento con corticoides, el antecedente de fractura y la realizacion previa de DXA. En el estudio multivariante solo se asociaron de manera significativa la DXA (p=0,03) y el antecedente de fractura (p=0,02). Conclusiones: En las mujeres postmenopausicas con AR de las Islas Canarias la prescripcion de bisfosfonatos podria adecuarse mejor a las guias, especialmente en pacientes que reciben tratamiento con corticoides. EnglishObjective: The objective of this study was to analyse the use of bisphosphonates in women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in the Canary Islands. Material and methods: This multicentre observational study included women aged 50 years or over. At a single visit, demographic variables and those relating to the RA, history of fragility fractures, use of corticoids, performance of bone densitometry (DXA) and current treatment with bisphosphonates were recorded. The simplified FRAX ® tool was used and the recommendations of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) for the prophylaxis of osteoporosis with corticoids were applied. Results: 192 women were included, with an average age of 62 years. A total of 91 (48%) patients were receiving corticoids; 17 of these (9%) had suffered a fracture; 123 (66%) had had a DXA; and 52 (28%) were taking bisphosphonates (70% of the patients with osteoporosis or fracture and 45% of those with criteria for prophylactic use of corticoids for osteoporosis). Those factors having a significant association with the use of bisphosphonates were age, duration of the disease, the HAQ functional capacity questionnaire, the risk of fracture determined by FRAX®, treatment with corticoids, history of fracture and the previous performance of DXA. In the multivariate study only the DXA (p=0.03) and history of fracture (p=0.02) were significantly associated. Conclusions: In postmenopausal women from the Canary Islands with RA the prescription of bisphosphonates could conform better to the guidelines, especially in patients receiving treatment with corticoids.

This paper examines U.S. public and private commercial real estate returns at the aggregate level and by the four major property types over the 1994–2012 time period. Returns are carefully adjusted for differences between public and private markets in financial leverage, property type focus and management fees. Unconditionally, we find that passive portfolios of unlevered core real estate investment trusts (REITs) outperformed their private market benchmark by 49 basis points (annualized) over the 1994–2012 sample period. Our baseline vector autoregression results suggest that REIT returns do not embed additional commercial real-estate-specific information useful in predicting private market returns. These results strongly suggest that equity REIT returns react to fundamental (latent) asset pricing information more quickly than private market returns given their greater liquidity and price revelation. REITs therefore serve as a fundamental information transmission channel to private market returns when asset pricing variables are omitted. Investors can hold ownership positions in commercial real estate (CRE) both through direct private investment and public real estate securities. Purchasing individual properties directly in the private market gives investors complete control of the asset: who leases it, who manages it, how much debt financing is used and when it is sold. With publicly traded real estate securities, individuals andinstitutionsinvestcapitalinarealestatecompanywhich,inturn,purchases, manages and holds title to the real estate. In contrast to private real estate markets, exchange-traded real estate securities provide investors with a relatively high degree of liquidity and transparency and relatively low transaction costs. Nevertheless, returns in both private and public CRE markets should be driven, at least in the long run, by the net cash flows derived from leasing space to tenants in local property markets.

The theoretical literature suggests a positive relation between financial leverage and asset returns, but the empirical evidence on this effect is mixed. We examine leverage effects in public real estate markets across eight countries with active public real estate markets. Cross-country public real estate markets provide an interesting testing ground given the significant use of leverage in real estate markets, the variation in REIT capital structures within and across countries, and the cross-country differences in liquidity, ownership, economic, institutional, and capital market structures. After carefully isolating leverage effects in firm-level returns, we find that leverage has a significant effect on returns both unconditionally and conditionally using standard asset pricing models. In addition, greater use of leverage during the 2007–2008 REIT crisis period is associated with larger share price declines.

This paper examines U.S. REIT leverage decisions and their effects on risk and return. We find that REITs are highly levered relative to industrial firms, with an average market leverage of 46 percent over our 1990-2012 sample period. Using partial adjustment models, we further find that the speed of adjustment at which REITs close the gap between current debt levels and target leverage levels is 17 percent annually, with over-levered REITs tending to adjust more quickly to their target leverage ratios than under-levered REITs. We also find that REITs that are highly levered relative to the average REIT tend to underperform REITs with less debt in their capital structure. However, REITs that are highly levered relative to their target leverage tend to perform better on a risk-adjusted basis than under-levered REITs. Taken together, our results show that REIT leverage has significant return performance effects conditional on deviations from target leverage.

We provide robust evidence showing local information plays a significant role in local asset concentrations and return outperformance. Using a unique setting with significant cross-market information asymmetries and large sample of individual commercial property holdings, we find property portfolio managers concentrate an economically significant portion of their portfolios in their headquarter location. We further document a significant positive relation between local concentration and portfolio returns in markets where information asymmetry is most severe. Through numerous robustness and loan-level identification tests, we further confirm an information-based channel of asset concentration and return effects that is distinct from risk-based or behavioral explanations.

Using novel data on detailed country-level sales exposures of U.S. multinational companies (MNCs) and unique identification strategies, we show that international cash flow diversification enhances firm debt capacity, but the magnitude of this effect varies with the innate country institutional frictions to which the firm is exposed. We find that a one standard deviation increase in MNC across-country cash flow diversification results in a 5 percent increase in firm leverage from its sample average. However, across-country institutional quality and tax frictions reduce the MNC geographic diversification benefit by 27 to 55 percent from the debt capacity enhancement without such frictions.

We find that CDS spreads contribute significantly to price discovery in financial markets when firm-specific credit information is prominent. Using 3,470 S&P rating notch and watch changes for U.S. public and private entities from 2001-2013, we show that CDS prices contain unique firm credit risk information that is not captured by the prices of other related securities such as stock and bonds of the same firm. Credit information unidirectionally flows from CDS to bonds, particularly for private entities whose stocks are not concurrently trading in markets. We further find that CDS returns significantly predict stock returns, particularly their idiosyncratic components.

Corporate managers often invest in activities that are deemed to be socially responsible. In some instances, these investments enhance shareholder value. However, in other cases, altruistic managers or managers who privately benefit from the positive attention arising from these activities may choose to make socially responsible investments even if they are not value enhancing. Given this backdrop, we investigate the various factors that motivate firm managers to make socially responsible investments. We find that larger firms, firms with greater free cash flow, and higher advertising outlays demonstrate higher levels of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We also find that companies with stronger institutional ownership are less likely to invest in CSR — which casts doubt on the argument that these investments are designed to promote shareholder value. Consistent with the literature that explores how CEO personal attributes influence corporate decision making, we find that female CEOs, younger CEOs, and managers who donate to both Republican and Democratic parties are significantly more likely to invest in CSR. This latter result suggests that CSR investments may not be driven solely for altruistic reasons, but instead may be part of a broader strategy to create goodwill and/or help maintain good political relations. Finally, we find a strong positive connection between the level of media scrutiny surrounding the firm and its CEO, and the level of CSR investment. This finding suggests that media attention helps induce firms to make socially responsible investments.

This article examines the relation between investor sentiment and returns in private markets. Relative to more liquid public markets, private investment markets exhibit significant limits to arbitrage that restrict an investor’s ability to counteract mispricing. Using vector autoregressive models, we find a positive and economically significant relation between investor sentiment and subsequent private market returns. We provide further long-horizon regression evidence suggesting that private commercial real estate markets are susceptible to prolonged periods of sentiment-induced mispricing as the inability to short-sell in periods of overvaluation and restricted access to credit in periods of undervaluation prevents arbitrageurs from entering the market. A growing behavioral approach in the economics and finance literature recognizes the bounded rationality and psychological biases of investors who often rely on and are influenced by computational shortcuts, heuristics, frame dependence and intuition when making decisions in a complicated and uncertain world with market frictions (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982, Barberis and Thaler 2003). As a result, changes in asset prices may be driven by more than changes in market fundamentals. 1 Furthermore, these temporary price deviations can persist if there are significant limits to arbitrage as shown theoretically by De Long et al. (1990) and Shleifer and Vishny (1997), among others. Recent empirical research suggests this movement away from

Chemical compositions of approximately 5,500 fly ash samples from 36 power plants inside and outside Texas, compiled by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) over 18 years, were statistically analyzed in this study. The variations of oxide contents and their correlations were calculated and compared. Oxide contents of Class F fly ashes were found to be more variable than Class C fly ashes. In general, CaO and MgO contents were higher in Class C fly ashes than in Class F fly ashes, whereas the latter had higher SiO2 content. Other oxide contents of the two classes of fly ashes were comparable. Then, to demonstrate the potential beneficial use of chemical composition information of fly ash, an alkali-silica reaction (ASR) durability index was proposed to predict the comparative performance of fly ash in mitigating ASR in concrete. The index value was calculated using SiO2, Fe2O3, Al2O3, CaO, and equivalent alkali contents. Previously published research on the use of fly ash in mitigating AS...

In this study, we examine the influence of real estate market sentiment, market-level uncertainty, and REIT-level uncertainty on cumulative abnormal earnings announcement returns over the 1995–2009 time period. We first document the relative coverage of analysts' earnings forecasts on U.S. REITs, as well as REITs from several countries (i.e., Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Japan, the Netherlands, and UK). We show that coverage outside of the U.S. is limited, and we consequently focus our analysis on U.S. REITs. We find strong evidence that earnings announcements contain pricing relevant information, with positive (negative) earnings surprises relative to analysts' forecasts resulting in significantly positive (negative) abnormal returns around the announcement date. Consistent with the findings from the broader equity market literature, we find limited evidence of a pre-announcement drift in the cumulative abnormal returns. However, in sharp contrast to the existing equity literature, we find no evidence of a post-earnings announcement drift in our aggregate sample or when the sample is restricted to the largest negative surprises. We find evidence of a post-earnings announcement drift for only the largest positive earnings surprises. These results are consistent with REIT returns more quickly impounding information relative to the broader equity market, in part because of the parallel private real estate market and because of the U.S. REIT structure and information environment. Finally, in our conditional regression analysis of cumulative abnormal returns, we find that real estate investor sentiment, market-wide uncertainty, and firm-level uncertainty significantly affect the magnitude of abnormal announcement returns and also influence the effect of unexpected earnings on abnormal returns.

We document that related securities linked through firm fundamentals provide important cross-market return performance information. Using 1,074 firms during 2003-2014, we find stock return momentum for “joint” winners/losers whose past stock and CDS returns are in congruence, whereas return reversal for “disjoint” entities whose past stock returns disagree with their past CDS returns. Stock strategies combining momentum on joint winners/losers with contrarian on disjoint winners/losers outperform traditional stock momentum by 132 bps per month with an annualized Sharpe ratio of 1.11. Relative pricing of credit across related securities explains, in part, the cross-section of stock return momentum.

This study examines the sensitivity of equity REIT returns to the time-varying MSA allocations of REIT underlying property portfolios. Using a large sample of individual commercial property holdings, we find significant cross-sectional and time variation in REIT geographic exposures and the ability of these exposures to explain the cross-section of REIT returns. Importantly, the pattern of MSA exposure effects changes quickly as local market information is incorporated into property values both across MSAs and over time. We further find that REIT managers are able, on average, to both identify MSAs that will outperform in the following year and overcome the costs and delays associated with increasing allocations to these MSAs. The ability to time entry into high performing markets is concentrated in well diversified REITs and those with large market capitalizations and high employee counts. Firms with a larger platform and experience owning and operating properties in multiple markets are better positioned to quickly act on investment opportunities they identify in major MSAs.

Using derivative usage data on over 1746 firms headquartered in the U.S. during the 1991 through 2000 time period, we find that firms with greater agency and monitoring problems (i.e., firms that are less transparent, face greater agency costs, have weaker corporate governance, larger information asymmetry problems, and overall poorer monitoring) exhibit a negative association between Tobin's Q and derivative usage. The negative valuation effect is also economically significant with an impact of -8.4% on Tobin's Q from a one standard deviation change in the firm monitoring index. The results are robust to alternative specifications, time varying estimates, econometric procedures that correct for potential clustering of errors, endogeneity problems, and sample selection biases among other robustness checks discussed in the paper. We conclude that derivative usage has a negative impact on firm value in firms with greater agency and monitoring problems.

Little is known about the effects of real estate ownership and leasing on the stock return characteristics of public firms. In this study, we first examine the sensitivity of retail firm returns to a real estate factor over the period 1998–2008. The retail industry is chosen because of the significant use of real estate in a typical retail firm’s production function. Consistent with our expectations, retail stocks exhibit positive real estate risk exposure, even after controlling for sensitivity to general market risk as well as other standard risk factors. The second part of our analysis examines whether the intensity of real estate ownership and the use of off-balance operating leases to finance real property holdings are reflected in the market and real estate betas of retail stocks. We find that greater use of off-balance sheet operating leases is associated with higher market betas. In fact, the use of operating leases appears to have a larger impact on sensitivity to market risk than does the use of on-balance sheet debt. Our findings also confirm our hypothesis that real estate intensive firms display significantly greater exposure to a real estate factor. Moreover, our results strongly suggest that investors are fully aware of the risk associated with off-balance sheet operating leases.

This paper examines the sources of cross-country comovement of momentum returns over the 1975–2004 period. Using data on more than 17,000 individual firms across 100 industries from 40 countries, we document the profitability of country-neutral individual firm, industry, and industry-adjusted return momentum. We show that country-neutral momentum returns are significantly correlated across countries, the correlation is time-varying, and that comovement among industries cannot explain the comovement of country-neutral momentum returns. However, we find that standard risk factor models do explain a significant portion of the cross-country comovement of momentum returns, even though they do not explain average momentum returns.

This article examines the short- and long-run dynamics among institutional capital flows and returns in private real estate markets. At the aggregate U.S. level, we find evidence that lagged institutional flows significantly influence subsequent returns. When disaggregating by property type at the national level, we find that capital flows predict subsequent returns in the apartment and office sectors, but not in the retail and industrial markets. At the metropolitan level, we find that the flows help explain subsequent returns in a limited number of core business statistical areas (CBSAs), although these CBSAs collectively represent about 30% of institutional capital. We find no evidence that institutional returns are predictive of future capital flows at the national or CBSA level, suggesting that institutional investors are not chasing returns.

This paper examines the relationships between split ratings and ratings migration. We find that bonds with split ratings are more likely to have future rating changes. A one-notch (more-than-one-notch) split rating increases the probability of rating change within one year of initial issuance by about 3% (6%). Furthermore, we find that about 30% of split rated bonds have their two ratings converge after four years of initial issuance. The rating convergence tapers off after three years, and the rating agency with a higher (lower) initial rating generally maintains a higher (lower) rating in subsequent years if the two ratings do not converge. We also show that rating transition estimation can be improved by taking into consideration split ratings. We find that one-year rating transition matrices are significantly different between non-letter-split rated bonds and letter-split rated bonds, and we show that the difference has an economically significant impact on the pricing of credit spread options and VaR-based risk management models. Overall, our results suggest that split ratings contain important information about subsequent rating changes.

This paper investigates the role of fundamentals and investor sentiment in commercial real estate valuation. In real estate markets, heterogeneous properties trade in illiquid, highly segmented and informationally inefficient local markets. Moreover, the inability to short sell private real estate restricts the ability of sophisticated traders to enter the market and eliminate mispricing. These characteristics would seem to render private real estate markets highly susceptible to sentiment-induced mispricing. Using error correction models to carefully model potential lags in the adjustment process, this paper extends previous work on cap rate dynamics by examining the extent to which fundamentals and investor sentiment help to explain the time-series variation in national-level cap rates. We find evidence that investor sentiment impacts pricing, even after controlling for changes in expected rental growth, equity risk premiums, T-bond yields, and lagged adjustments from long run equilibrium.

We examine corporate product diversification as a dynamic process. Consistent with prior research, we find that the average diversification discount is about 8% when using the standard valuemultiple approach. However we find that a significantportion of the diversification discount arises from benchmark comparisons of value ratios of mature firms with those of very young firms that are more likely to have high value multiples. The magnitude of the diversification discount falls by 15% to 30% when we control for firm age. We also show that diversification reduces the mortality rate offirms, and we provide evidence that mature firms pursue diversification strategies partly as a means to exit stagnant business segments for industries that are more highly valued. Since the 1990s, the relation between corporate product diversification and firm value has received considerable attention. Researchers have shown that firms diversified along product lines trade at a discount on average, compared to focused firms. Consequently, many researchers and practitioners argue that firms should focus their business lines, but a large number of firms remain diversified and many others continue to diversify.' Firms typically begin as focused entities and, as they age, they often expand their business scope, in many cases as a survival response to market pressures. In addition to its impact on the likelihood of diversification, firm age is also likely to affect the measured value of diversification. In the standard Berger and Ofek (1995) imputed-value approach, a weighted average of pure-play market multiples are used to calculate the implied value of diversified firms. However, these multiples may be affected by factors other than the firm's organizational structure. Firm age, for example, may be a useful proxy for growth opportunities and other factors that are likely to have a profound effect on the market multiples of individual firms. Therefore, the estimated value of diversification is likely to vary over time with changes in the average age of publicly traded firms. Indeed, Fama and French (2004) demonstrate that the percentage of new firms and the characteristics of new lists have changed substantially since 1973. In this paper, we examine the influence that firm age has on organizational structure and on the observed average diversification discount, and the influence of organizational structure on firm survival. We demonstrate that 15% to 30% of the estimated diversification discount is a firm age discount and that diversified firms are less likely than focused firms to go out of business.

Momentum return investment strategies that diversify across countries provide lower portfolio standard deviations and/or increased expected returns. These diversification benefits are larger when adding emerging markets than when adding developed markets, and they are larger than would be suggested by diversifying with long-only portfolios. Using data on almost 16,000 firms from 22 developed and 18 emerging markets over the 1990–2004 period, we confirm the profitability of momentum trading strategies in both developed and emerging markets and document the diversification benefits of including emerging markets in an international momentum portfolio investment strategy.

This paper examines the effects of geographic portfolio concentration on the return performance of U.S. public REITs versus private commercial real estate over the 1996-2013 time period. We document significant cross-sectional and temporal differences in the geographic concentration of property holdings across public and private real estate markets. Adjusting private market returns for differences in geographic concentrations with public markets, we find that core private market performance falls. This performance drop arises primarily from lower geographically adjusted retail performance. In contrast, geographically adjusted industrial and office property performance rises slightly while apartment performance remains relatively unchanged. Using return performance attribution analysis, we find that the geographic allocation effect constitutes only a small portion of the total return difference between public and private market returns, whereas individual property selection within geographic locations explains, in part, the documented outperformance of public versus private real estate market returns. This result also suggests that the decision to allocate to a geographic location is relatively less important than the manager‘s ability to select and manage properties within that location.

This study examines the effects of weekly and monthly capital flows into the dedicated REIT mutual fund sector on aggregate REIT returns and, simultaneously, the effects of industry-level REIT returns on subsequent REIT mutual fund flows. The dynamic relation between REIT capital flows and returns is estimated using vector autoregression (VAR) techniques. Unlike static regression techniques, our dynamic model produces estimates of the short-run relationships, long-run relationships, impulse response functions, and forecast variance decompositions. We find evidence that REIT mutual fund flows are positively and significantly related to prior returns, while prior REIT mutual fund flows do not significantly influence REIT returns. However, contemporaneous flows do appear to have an initial positive effect, which is partially reversed one period later. The positive contemporaneous effect, however, is the result of unexpected REIT mutual fund flows, while the expected portion is insignificant.

We provide evidence on the value of industrial and international diversification for more than 3000 firms from Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. Consistent with prior studies, we find that industrial diversification reduces firm value in the U.K. and the U.S. Furthermore, similar to the recent findings of Denis et al. [J. Finance 57 (2002)], we find that U.S. multinationals trade at a discount relative to firms operating only in the domestic market. This result is robust to different benchmarks used to measure the value of diversification. By contrast, we find that international diversification has no effect on the value of firms headquartered in either Germany or the U.K.

This study examines the effects of capital flows into the REIT sector on REIT returns and, simultaneously, the effects of REIT returns on subsequent REIT capital flows. The dynamic relation between REIT capital flows and returns is estimated using vector autoregression (VAR) techniques. Unlike static regression techniques, our dynamic model produces estimates of the short-run relationships, long-run relationships, impulse response functions and forecast variance decompositions. We find evidence that REIT equity flows are significantly positively related to the prior quarter's flows and negatively related to flows from two quarters ago. The evidence on the responsiveness of flows to prior returns is time-period specific. In the important post-1992 subperiod, REIT returns do not significantly affect REIT flows in any of the VAR model specifications. Simultaneously, REIT capital flows do appear to have a significant influence on equity REIT returns.

In this paper, we investigate the effects of GSE (government sponsored enterprise) activities on mortgage yield spreads and volatility. Using various regression procedures (i.e., vector error correction (VEC) and GARCH models) and controlling for default and prepayment risk, we find that securitizations and purchases of mortgages by GSEs reduce mortgage yield spreads and volatility. In particular, we find that the yield spread between conforming and 10-year constant maturity treasury (CMT) rates decreases by 8.0 bp per $1billion increase in the level of GSE securitizations. Similarly, if GSEs increase mortgage purchases, the yield spread decreases 10.5 bp per $1billion increase of purchases. In addition, we hypothesize and find that GSE activities have a spillover effect to the non-conforming mortgage market; via investor substitutions, GSE purchases and securitizations of conforming loans reduce non-conforming loan rates. Thus, the measured influence of GSE activities is biased downward when measured using the spread of non-conforming loans over conforming loan rates. We also find that purchases of mortgages by GSEs significantly reduce mortgage yield volatility. In sum, our findings show that GSE activities reduce and stabilize mortgage market rates.

This Internet Appendix provides supplementary results to the main analyses in "Exodus from Sovereign Risk: Global Asset and Information Networks in the Pricing of Corporate Credit Risk" by Lee, Naranjo, and Sirmans (2014).The paper to which these Appendices apply is available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2492204

This paper examines the ability of firms to overcome cross-country borrowing barriers through foreign asset connections. We find that firm-level foreign assets are an important mechanism in reducing the boundary between borrowers and lenders and thereby enhancing capital access in the syndicated loan market. Our results suggest that firms with foreign assets are more likely to select a foreign lead lender and that the corresponding loans have better pricing terms. We also find that the institutional and regulatory environment heavily influences the choice of lender, and that borrowers are more likely to partner with bankers with whom they share common cultural and language ties. These results lend support to the hypothesis that foreign presence helps reduce information barriers that may arise across borders.

Using 5-year credit default swap (CDS) spreads on 2,364 companies in 54 countries during 2004-2011, we show firms exposed to better property rights institutions through their foreign asset positions (Institutional channel) and firms whose stocks are cross-listed on exchanges with stricter disclosure requirements (Informational channel) reduce their CDS spreads by 40 bps for a one standard deviation increase in their exposure on the two channels. These channels capture distinct effects beyond those associated with firm- and country-level fundamentals. Overall, we find that firm-level global asset and information connections are important mechanisms to delink firms from their sovereign and country risks.The appendices for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2492206