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Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are on-going concerns that invest, divest and recycle capital into properties that provide stable long term distributions for shareholders. REIT property portfolios require renewals through divestment of inefficient assets to be replaced by more efficient assets. While most of the previous literature focuses on the effect of acquisition/divestment event on REIT-level performance, little research has been carried out on property-level renewal process of REIT portfolios. In particular, this paper focuses on (i) the choice of properties for divestment, (ii) the choice of the timing to divest such properties, and (iii) the management strategy leading up to divestment. To address these questions, we use the unique property-level datasets for Japanese REITs that contain information on property characteristics and their performance with half-year frequency while the properties are in the portfolio, that is, from the initial acquisition to the final divestment.First, we investigate the determinants of the property designated for divestment using the probit model. We provide a strong evidence that properties requiring relatively large operation cost and/or are less yield accretive with respect to the REIT portfolio, and/or properties that do not match the geographical focus of the REIT, are likely to be divested. These assets are usually replaced with more efficient assets. Second, we investigate the timing of such divestments using the probit model. We show that properties may be divested after undergoing relatively large drop in capital value. Third, we investigate whether REITs engage in short-term earnings management post the divestment decision. Our fixed-effect panel estimations show that REITs reduce the size of capital expenditure, which is a long-term investment, just before the divestment so that their final net cash flow, which indicates the short-term property performance, look attractive for potential buyers.Further subsample analysis on market dynamics reveals that, unlike the entire sample, REITs seek for capital gain and even divest properties which are efficient for their portfolio during the REIT restructuring periods around 2010, suggesting the need for REITs to liquidate those properties during this time period.

Purpose Houses are durable, so an imbalance between demand and supply occurs after time has passed since initial construction. The purpose of this study is to quantify the extent of this imbalance for existing houses, focusing on the heterogeneity across property segments. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a unique data set on the “inquiry volume” that each property received from an online real estate portal to measure the volume of demand in relation to supply. Simple regressions are conducted in the resale condominium market across the Tokyo metropolitan area. Findings The inquiry volume successfully tracked a recent expected trend in which demand relative to supply is stronger for condominiums in reasonably priced areas, condominiums in convenient, accessible locations, condominiums built within the last 20 years and compact and spacious units. This study also confirms that these trends cannot be captured through heterogeneity in price levels, which has been widely used in previous studies on measuring housing preferences. Practical implications As an indicator of conditions in the housing market, the property-level inquiry volume has strong potential to provide useful information for supply strategies and for the sustainable use of existing housing stocks. Originality/value The originality of this paper is the use of information on the buyer side, which is typically unobservable.

Although a substantial number of houses in shrinking societies face long-term vacancy and ownership abandonment, previous literature on housing market structures has independently modelled illiquid status due to temporary decline in demand, implicitly assuming that all potential sellers try to sell in the market. This paper proposes a unified framework for the process of housing market shrinkage, in which long-term vacancy is followed by market withdrawal. Our simple model of a distressed housing market indicates that the market can seem “liquid” even though the demand is actually small: only forced sellers who need to dispose of their properties quickly will try to sell at low prices; whereas, the buyer–seller ratio in the market becomes sizable in equilibrium. This implies a need to capture the degree of sellers’ exits to understand the microstructure of remaining housing markets.

With a simple model of land use and market arbitrage, this paper investigates the impact of population decline – when existing homeowners compete to attract a small number of new residents – on homeownership and land use. We show that, if a strictly positive cost is required for ownership abandonment, selling used houses is impossible in the periphery, while leasing is possible. We also show that only long-life-quality houses, which require a larger initial investment and sustain greater utility for longer than conventional ones, attract new residents to the periphery. Social welfare may decrease, because the government has to maintain the slowly shrinking, less densely inhabited urban area.

In Japan, tenants are protected in the sense that owners must compensate them for evicting them against their will, while owners cannot foresee the intended tenure length of prospective tenants. If owners cannot specify the term of a lease, social inefficiency emerges: (i) detached houses owned by individual households remain vacant for a certain period; (ii) alternatively, landlords’ newly constructed apartments, which are free from eviction risk, accommodate a large proportion of tenants; and (iii) the apartments are rebuilt frequently even though they remain viable. If a fixed-term contract is available, only short-term tenants choose it, and the information asymmetry is dissolved, realizing social efficiency. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

This paper documents housing rent rigidity under downward pressure, using the monthly household/room-level movement of housing rents through tenancies and vacancies in Tokyo during the period 2000Q1–2017Q2. The consistent overall rent rigidity exists because of the small extensive margin (limited adjustment opportunity) and small intensive margin (rare adjustment in the contract renewal stage). We observe rent rigidity leading to a “tenure surcharge,” that is, sitting tenants pay higher rents than the market rent level because the alternative—high moving costs for tenants—is less attractive. The downward rent rigidity obviously cannot rationalize the conventional explanation of upward rent rigidity in an inflationary context, such as depreciation and/or tenure discount. We show, however, that landlords care about retaining good long-term tenants by offering a small discount during the tenancy, along with a small degree of time/state-dependent adjustments.

A 61-year-old Japanese male was admitted to hospital due to severe congestive heart failure and pre-renal failure with middle aortic syndrome. The patient was successfully treated with emergent aortic angioplasty and kissing stents implantation whilst in a hemodynamically unstable state. Our experience confirms that stenosis of the descending aorta when treated with catheter intervention may be palliative, however, it was a very effective method for life threatening clinical conditions in the short and mid-term and may be an alternative to surgery.

We present a rather new task of detecting and collecting tweets that contain heartwarming stories from a huge amount of tweets on Twitter in this paper. We also present a method for identifying heartwarming tweets. Our prediction method is based on a supervised learning algorithm in SVM along with features from the tweets. We found by comparing the feature sets that adding sentiment features mostly improves the performance. However, simply adding the features for detecting a story in a tweet (past tense and tweet length) cannot contribute to improving the performance, while adding all the features to the baseline feature set mostly yields the best performance from among the feature sets.

How should the legal framework for the protection of human genomic data be formulated?—Implications from the revision processes of the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (PPI Act)

DNA detection is widely used for gene analysis. However, false-positive results are difficult to be avoided due to the non-specific amplification. Here, we described a novel RCA approach to improve the specificity. With the help of TspR I (endonuclease), DNA was cleaved into smaller duplex fragments, including the target DNA fragment, with 9 nt sticky ends. A duplex adaptor with two sticky ends which were complementary to that of the target fragment was designed. After hybridization of the adaptor with the target fragments, T4 DNA ligase was used to ligate them to form a circular ds DNA with a gap. Then RCA was carried out from the free 3′-end of the open strand by Phi29 DNA polymerase with two primers which were complementary to the target sequence. Different from the traditional padlock-RCA, SC-RCA showed excellent specificity by amplifying the specific DNA target other than the added probe.

An advanced rolling circle amplification (RCA) strategy based on the target-circularization of the targeted double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) was established. Different from the traditional padlock-RCA, in which single-stranded probe DNA was circularized and amplified as signal amplification, our new approach could amplify a double-stranded DNA target. This special circularization of the target was realized by the ligation of target DNA with a biotin-labelled duplex adaptor containing 9 nt sticky ends by complementary base pairing. High specificity was obtained using two primers targeting the target sequence but not the probe itself in traditional padlock-RCA. With the help of streptavidin magnetic beads that immobilized the ligated dsDNA amplicon, the background nucleic acids contributing the most to non-specific amplification were eliminated. Under optimized conditions, less than 60 copies of the target sequence could be detected in the presence of massive background nucleic acids (>1012 copies of unrelated sequences). The sensitivity and specificity can rival canonical PCR. Without thermal cycles, the reduced handling and simpler equipment requirements render this assay a simple and rapid alternative to conventional methods. Based on these advantages, this method is a promising candidate in practical applications such as detecting contaminated food-borne pathogens in comprehensive food samples.

To quantify the rate of oxidation of tritium gas (referred to as HT) to tritiated water in the environment, various woody and herbaceous plant leaves and roots, mosses and lichens taken from a forest and fields in Ibaraki prefecture, and a forest in Toki, Gifu prefecture, were investigated as to their ability to oxidize atmospheric HT in in vitro experiments. The HT oxidation activity in vegetation was compared with that in the surrounding surface soil (0-5 cm in depth). The rate of oxidation of HT in woody plant leaves including pine needles was extremely low, only about 1/10000-1/1000 that in the surface soil, as well as in herbaceous plant leaves with some exceptions (Phalaris arundinacea and Vaccinium smallii), whereas the rate in mosses and lichens was 50-500 times that in pine needles. The HT oxidation activity in roots of several plants including Phalaris arundinacea, Pieris japonica and Lespedeza homoloba was quite high and comparable to that in the surrounding surface soil. These results suggest that mosses, lichens and the leaves or roots of particular plants with high HT oxidation activity can be used to monitor the accidental release of HT into the environment.

The oxidation of atmospheric molecular tritium (HT) in vegetation was determined by in vitro experiments for pine needles, pine bark, lichens attached to pine trees, taken from a coastal pine forest in Ibaraki prefecture and comparison of such measurements was made with those in soil. The oxidation of HT in pine needles was extremely low, being only about 1/40000 that in the surface soil of a pine forest, whereas its oxidation in pine bark with a lichen was almost 1000-7000 times higher than that in pine needles. HT oxidation in pine bark, a lichen and a moss was determined in each case under light and dark conditions and was found to be essentially the same. All mosses and lichens examined in the present study were found to have unusually high levels of HT oxidation whether their habitat was tree or ground surface.

A similar floral vascular anatomy involving a constant dimerous, bicarpellate plan for each of the threeMaianthemum species is reported. All of the tepal, stamen and ovary traces are derived via repeated radial division of two pedicel bundles. The four tepal and stamen traces are fusion products, as are the two dorsals. A third, smaller (vestigial) pedicel bundle which continues unbranched and uninvolved into the ovary was observed in all three species. It could indicate a past reduction from a trimerous, tricarpellate condition, and gives a basis for comparison to the closely related genusSmilacina. The gynoecial vasculature lacks peripheral laterals, septal axials and terminal cross-connections between the dorsal and ventral supplies. The placentation is only apparently axile, since the two septa divide at the mid-ovary level. Consistently the four co-lateral ovules which are anatropous and bitegmic are supplied by four free placentals. The placentals supplying the two ovules of a given carpel have had a common origin in a single pedicel bundle. Raphides characterize post-fertilization ovaries in all species. ADrusa-type of embyro sac formation shown forM. dilatatum corresponds with that known for the other species. An internal stigmoidal tissue system involving micropylar obturators extends from the base of each locule through the hollow stylar canal. Temporal separation occurs between male and female meiosis (protandry), and outbreeding is further promoted by terminal septal glands functioning as nectaries and the synchronized closure of the common carpellary cavity by inter-digitating papillae on the inner septal margins.

A similar floral vascular anatomy involving a constant dimerous, bicarpellate plan for each of the threeMaianthemum species is reported. All of the tepal, stamen and ovary traces are derived via repeated radial division of two pedicel bundles. The four tepal and stamen traces are fusion products, as are the two dorsals. A third, smaller (vestigial) pedicel bundle which continues unbranched and uninvolved into the ovary was observed in all three species. It could indicate a past reduction from a trimerous, tricarpellate condition, and gives a basis for comparison to the closely related genusSmilacina. The gynoecial vasculature lacks peripheral laterals, septal axials and terminal cross-connections between the dorsal and ventral supplies. The placentation is only apparently axile, since the two septa divide at the mid-ovary level. Consistently the four co-lateral ovules which are anatropous and bitegmic are supplied by four free placentals. The placentals supplying the two ovules of a given carpel have had a common origin in a single pedicel bundle. Raphides characterize post-fertilization ovaries in all species. ADrusa-type of embyro sac formation shown forM. dilatatum corresponds with that known for the other species. An internal stigmoidal tissue system involving micropylar obturators extends from the base of each locule through the hollow stylar canal. Temporal separation occurs between male and female meiosis (protandry), and outbreeding is further promoted by terminal septal glands functioning as nectaries and the synchronized closure of the common carpellary cavity by inter-digitating papillae on the inner septal margins.