Crocker Liu

• Cornell University

We provide new evidence of the demand for better schools as manifested in bidding wars and changes to the built environment. Using repeat sales before and after a redistricting, we exploit shocks to school quality arising from the continuous, unexpected redistricting of school attendance boundaries in Atlanta. We find houses redistricted to higher...

We provide a new framework for using text as data in empirical models. The framework identifies salient information in unstructured text that can control for multidimensional heterogeneity among assets. We demonstrate the efficacy of the framework by reexamining principal-agent problems in residential real estate markets. We show that the agent-own...

This article analyzes auctions that can feature two bidding rounds for the sale of a single good. In the first round the seller, after analyzing the received bids, may elect to have k bidders rebid. The highest bidder in the second round then acquires the asset at the highest bid price. We use a sample of 67 properties that sold through this auctio...

We empirically investigate the hypothesis that the less transparent (more difficult to value) the target's assets are the more likely it is that the acquiring firm can obtain higher short- and long-term returns. We analyze a sample of 1,538 friendly acquisitions partitioned in two separate dimensions: acquisitions of public versus private firms, an...

Recent studies involving the analysis of housing prices have found evidence that housing prices are affected by local urban economic variables like growth in the labor market within a particular MSA. We create and employ new forward looking employment growth indices that measure the urban economic strength of an MSA and find that it explains house...

Commercial real estate indices play an important role in performance evaluation and overall investment strategy. However, the issue of how representative they are of the returns on portfolios of commercial properties is an open issue. Our study addresses this topic by analyzing a sample of 12,427 repeat sales transactions between Q4 2000 and Q2 201...

This paper studies the trading behavior of individual Chinese investors before and during the recent…financial crisis.We have three major …findings: (i) individual investors did not withdraw their capital from the equity market during the crisis; instead, they reduced investments following portfolio gains; (ii) the asymmetric net‡ flow decisions ar...

The consensus that emerges from the current research on the linkage between securitized and direct investment in real estate is that direct (private) real estate returns play a relatively minor role in the real estate investment trust (REIT) return generating process. However, this result may at least partially be due to the coarseness of the measu...

We examine the role that analysts play in a firm's choice of underwriter using a sample of major U.S. investment banks. In order to best capture the competitive environment, which is critical to the potential role that analysts play, we limit our sample if firms to 161 real estate investment trusts (REITs) issuing debt or equity between 1996 and 20...

This paper studies the micro-foundations of commercial real estate risk and performance. Specifically, we analyze the linkage between tenant quality and the performance of commercial real estate. A commercial real estate asset can be valued as the sum of the discounted future cash flows of commercial lease contracts. The value of leases is in turn...

Previous studies of share repurchase have primarily focused on examining announcement effects and long-term operating performance in order to distinguish among the diverse possible hypotheses for repurchase. One of the most important rationales they have studied is the over-investment hypothesis: firms repurchase in order to avoid investing in nega...

We use real estate firms to examine how asset liquidation values influence a firm’s financing choices, since the productivity and quality of each asset is observable and potential measures of an asset’s liquidation value are easier to ascertain ex-ante. We show that compared to firms that issue equity, firms that issue debt have higher asset qualit...

We examine the role that analysts play in a firm's choice of underwriter using a sample of major U. S. investment banks. In order to best capture the competitive environment, which is critical to the potential role that analysts play, we limit our sample of firms to 161 real estate investment trusts (REITs) issuing debt or equity between 1996 and 2...

This article tests the ability of traditional capital structure theories to explain the issuance decisions of real estate investment trusts (REITs). For issuances made between 1997 and 2006, we find strong support for the market timing theory of capital structure. Controlling for past returns and growth, a REIT is more likely to issue equity when i...

This study addresses the recent performance of the U.S. residential real estate markets. We investigate the comovement among Case-Shiller Home Price Indices for 14 metropolitan areas between 1992 and 2008. We identify the portion of this comovement deemed as fundamental (excessive), which we define as the covariation that can (cannot) be attributed...

This study analyzes the impact of corporate governance structures at the initial public offering (IPO) date. We test hypotheses that firms with more shareholder-oriented governance structures receive higher valuations at the IPO stage and have better long-term performance. Our sample is a set of 107 IPOs of real estate investment trusts (REITs) bet...

Capital structure theory and empirical analysis has focused almost exclusively on the choice between debt and equity. Preferred stock has received relatively little attention, in contrast, even though this market, in the U.S., represented $868 billion in new capital during the period 1999 to 2005. This empirical study focuses on the reactions of eq...

This study analyzes how three groups of market participants--insiders, analysts, and all other investors--revised their expectations on New York Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in response to the catastrophic events of September 11, 2001. Our analysis reveals that, on the day when markets reopened, REITs with significant exposure to the New Y...

We study real estate purchases by major company CEOs, compiling a database of theprincipal residences of nearly every top executive in the Standard & Poor s 500 index. When a CEO buys real estate, future company performance is inversely related to the CEO s liquidation of company shares and options for financing the transaction. We also find that,...

In 1984, the State of Hawaii’s legislature enacted a law making it mandatory for real estate agents engaged in dual agency relationships (i.e., when the seller’s and the buyer’s agents are employed by the same real estate firm) to disclose this fact to both parties in writing. The assumption was that the dual agency relation was damaging to the sel...

This paper shows novel evidence on the mechanism through which financial constraints amplify fluctuations in asset prices and credit demand. It does so using contractual features of housing finance. Among agents whose housing demand is constrained by the availability of collateral, those who can borrow against a larger fraction of their housing val...

We examine the role that analysts play in a flrm's choice of underwriter using a sample of 161 real estate investment trusts (REITs) issuing debt and equity between 1996 and 2004. Using the estimation technique of Ljungqvist, Marston, and Wilhelm (2005a), which accounts for the endogeneity of analyst beha prices that are optimistic relative to comp...

A leading explanation for IPO cycles is time-varying supply and demand for the underlying assets of the firms that are considering going public. We test this hypothesis using REIT IPOs, taking advantage of the relative transparency of the underlying real asset markets. We document links between REIT IPO activity and both the conditions of the under...

We formulate and test several hypotheses on managerial motivation using organizational form changes in the real estate industry. We find that firms that switch to a more restrictive structure have increases in stock value and managerial ownership. Firms moving to a less restrictive structure have larger wealth effects when higher monitoring exists....

This paper analyzes the optimal quality decision of a producer in a multi-period setting with reputation effects. Using a unique database of returns on real estate limited partnerships (RELPs), we empirically examine alternative theoretical predictions of optimal producer strategy. In particular, we test whether the producers in our market invest i...

This study examines the reaction of the financial markets to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and how their behavior compared to the subsequent resolution in the corresponding real asset markets. This event provides an ideal setting to evaluate the accuracy of the market's reaction to external shocks since, unlike almost all studies o...

Dividend pricing/present value models relate current stock prices to expectations of future dividends. In this study we apply the West and Campbell-Shiller tests of the dividend pricing relation to an index of real estate investment trusts (REITs). REITs provide a unique test of these models since, during our study period, REITs were mandated to pa...

The paper offers some new evidence which suggests that Japanese equity and real estate markets might not necessarily behave in a parallel manner to US capital markets. These results are obtained from an examination of the nature of expected and unexpected movements in the returns of Japanese assets and US assets using a present-value model which al...

We study the impact of capital flights on the interaction of currency and equity markets in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand during the Asian crisis using the sequence of regime shifts in reduced-form linear relations between currency and equity returns, and between currency and equity return volatility estimat...

This paper applies a new statistical technology for identifying regime shifts to analyze recent data on real estate and equity markets in eight developing Far Eastern countries in the 1992-1998 time period. We find that regime shifts in volatility occur in the summer of 1997; however, most of the regime shifts in returns occur in the spring of 1998...

This paper analyzes the structural relationship between currency and equity markets in ten Far Eastern countries during the recent Asian crisis. This analysis is done separately for returns and for volatilities. Using a new statistical technology for identifying regime shifts, we are able to demonstrate how information shocks in these markets moved...

Real estate data are often characterized by data irregularities: missing data, censoring or truncation, measurement error, etc. Practitioners often discard missing- or censored-data cases and ignore measurement error. We argue here that an attractive remedy for these irregularity problems is simulation-based model fitting using the Gibbs sampler. T...

This article focuses on the specialized class of mutual funds that only invest in REITs. These funds are essentially a mutual fund of mutual funds and should only exist if fund managers have superior ability to select REITs or to time movements in the real estate market. Our empirical analysis shows that, contrary to almost all other mutual fund st...

One of the most controversial topics in modern financial economics is "excess volatility:" the notion that stock prices move too much to be explained by fundamental economic and firm-specific factors. While the initial work of Shiller indicated a high degree of excess volatility, subsequent research indicates that the degree of excess volatility is...

International real estate related securities are investigated to see whether they offer any incremental diversification benefits over foreign stocks using mean-variance analysis together with a multifactor latent variable model. Diversification benefits are found to be primarily driven by unanticipated returns which are partially driven by changes...

We study changes in organizational form in the real estate industry based on a sample of 128 changes announced during the period from January 1, 1966 through December 31, 1989. The rich variety of organizational forms of real estate firms with varying degrees of restrictiveness of the equity contract provides the setting for our study. We examine w...

This paper does a valuation analysis of senior-subordinated structure tranches backed by non-agency mortgages. The valuation is done using Monte Carlo simulation and employs the CIR interest rate process in conjunction with an empirical model estimated for non-agency mortgage prepayments and defaults. The sensitivity of the value of tranches to a n...

One of the most controversial topics in modern financial economics is 'excess volatility': the notion that stock prices move too much to be explained by fundamental economic and firm-specific factors. This research measures the extent of excess volatility in a special class of

We study changes in the real estate industry among organizational forms with varying degrees of restrictiveness and document the associated changes in profitability, free cash flow, debt, dividends, and investment policies. All troubled firms in our sample move to a more flexible organizational structure, with subsequent reductions in dividends, im...

The current study investigates whether real estate securities continue to act as a perverse inflation hedge in foreign countries given security design differences. Both a stationary and a nonstationary risk free rate are alternatively used in conjunction with the methodology of Fama and Schwert (1977) and also the methodology of Geske and Roll (198...

This study explores the role of direct real estate investment in a portfolio context incorporating the real estate imperfections of indivisible assets and no short sales. Mean-variance efficient portfolios are calculated using Treasury-bills, bond and equity indices together with cash flows and appraised values from a set of twenty-two properties h...

The purpose of this paper is to critique the existing empirical evidence on the investment performance of real estate relative to alternative asset categories. The key issue which guides this review of the investment performance literature is whether abnormal real estate returns are merely an illusion which arises from the shortcomings associated w...

Recent evidence suggests that all asset returns are predictable to some extent with excess returns on real estate relatively easier to forecast. This raises the issue of whether we can successfully exploit this level of predictability using various market timing strategies to realize superior performance over a buy-and-hold strategy. We find that t...

The current study uses a present value model that allows for a time-varying expected discount rate in conjunction with a VAR process to decompose real estate risk. The study finds that the variance of unexpected returns accounts for most of the total risk with cash-flow risk accounting for twice as much of the unexplained real estate risk, although...

There is substantial evidence that insider trading is present around corporate announcements and that this insider trading is motivated by private information. Using real estate investment trusts that choose to reappraise themselves as our sample, we establish that the appraisals contain information, but find no market response to the public announ...

The purpose of this study is to re‐evaluate the existing research on superior real estate investment performance and to suggest alternative explanations for previous findings. A portion of this analysis draws on data from the empirical studies reviewed to the extent possible with appraisal data as well as transaction data based on properties sold b...

The current study investigates whether systematic skewness offers an alternative perspective as to why the risk-adjusted returns on real estate should be similar to that for stocks. This is not a trivial issue since an affirmative finding implies that the authors might be incorrectly measuring real estate risk from both a pricing and a portfolio al...

Recent evidence suggests that the variation in the expected excess returns is predictable and arises from changes in business conditions. Using a multifactor latent variable model with time-varying risk premiums, we decompose excess returns into expected and unexpected excess returns to examine what determines movements in expected excess returns f...

The current study investigates whether the commercial real estate market is segmented from the stock market using the framework of Jorion and Schwartz (1986). Evidence is found to support the hypothesis that segmentation does exist as the result of indirect barriers such as the cost, amount, and quality of information for real estate rather than le...

This study investigates whether the composition of the market portfolio leads to different inferences on real estate performance. As a point of departure, this paper first explores whether the omission of assets in a market proxy leads to a biased measurement of investment performance. The study finds that ranking investment performance is not mean...

This study investigates the consequences of several imperfections associated with real estate markets on pricing and optimal investor portfolios from a CAPM context. CAPM assumptions are relaxed to recognize illiquidity, the consumption and investment attributes of owner-occupied housing, and a mildly segmented market structure. The study finds tha...

Highest and Best Use is often identified as the key concept supporting real estate use and value decisions. However, at best the concept has received ambiguous if not conflicting consideration as to its relevance in the literature of economics, finance, real estate, appraisal, and other areas of study concerned with land use decisions and valuation...

This paper investigates whether a segmented market exists for industrial real estate with respect to risk and return characteristics. Given the existence of industrial market segmentation, the next issue examined is whether a submarket perspective or an integrated real estate market orientation provides better rate of return estimates for individua...

Controversy exists regarding the extent to which real estate continues to behave like real estate once it is securitized as a real estate investment trust (REIT). The purpose of our study is to examine the nature of deviations of securitized real estate from its underlying fundamental value and the role that institutional flow of funds play in this...