William G. Hardin, Xiaoquan Jiang and Zhonghua Wu Online First™, 22 June 2010 Abstract Employing dividend yield decomposition, this paper explores the inflation illusion and inflation hedging effects on REIT stock prices. Results show that changes in expected inflation explain a large share of the time series variation of the mispricing component of the dividend yield. Also, while both inflation hedging and inflation illusion effects exist for REITs, the inflation illusion effect tends to dominate the hedging effect during the 1980 to 2008 period. These...

Yang-pin Shen, Chiuling Lu and Zong-Han Lin Online First™, 7 June 2010 Abstract We investigate the net effect between diversification benefit and information cost of international real estate mutual funds from three dimensions: whether investors can benefit from investing in international real estate mutual funds, whether managers of international real estate mutual funds possess superior market knowledge and timing abilities, and whether investors are motivated by returns or diversification. Our findings are threefold. First, the results show that...

Kiplan S. Womack Online First™, 29 May 2010 Abstract This study contributes new evidence to distinguish why mergers occur in the real estate industry by quantifying the combined firm return for nearly three decades of real estate mergers. As a measure of the overall change in shareholder wealth created by a merger, the combined firm return plays a key role in differentiating competing merger theories and is quantified for the real estate industry for the first time. Findings from this study are consistent with the notion that real estate mergers ...

Jang C. Jin and Eden S. H. Yu Online First™, 28 May 2010 Abstract Real estate programs are ranked based upon page counts of articles published in three major real estate journals. The page counts are employed to capture many variations in the length of articles. For each author, his/her most recent affiliation is used to evaluate the school competitiveness of current faculty members rather than a perceived school reputation of the past. In this study, we find that top-tier schools in real estate research are not necessarily the most famous schools in ...

Neil Bhutta Online First™, 27 May 2010 Abstract I estimate the credit supply effect of the Underserved Areas Goal (UAG), which establishes GSE purchase goals for mortgages to lower-income and minority neighborhoods. Taking advantage of discontinuous census tract eligibility rules and abrupt changes in tract eligibility, I find some evidence of a small UAG effect on GSE purchases and mortgage originations, without crowding-out of FHA and subprime lending. The results also suggest that the GSEs exploit the law’s lack of precision-targeting, yielding ...

DeForest McDuff Online First™, 22 May 2010 Abstract All real estate markets are local, or so the conventional wisdom goes. But just how local is local? I address this question empirically using over 75,000 repeat-sales transactions from a large suburban county of Washington D.C.. I construct and evaluate a variety of local home price indices defined by geography, price, and home type. I also calculate “house-specific” indices using locally weighted regressions with maximized kernel bandwidths. On the whole, local indices add a moderate amount of ...