Scholarly Works, Real Estate
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- Managing the threat of decoupling in the U.S. affordable housing industryRead, Dustin C.; Sedgwick, Donna (Springer, 2024-08-12)Decoupling, or the practice of communicating different organizational values and goals than those rigorously pursued, is a concept discussed in the organization theory literature. Organizations engage in it when their legitimacy hinges on obtaining the support of stakeholders with disparate interests, and they attempt to appease some stakeholders with words and others with actions. One problem with decoupling is that it can lead organizations to operate in ways that are not reflective of their stated missions. With this concern in mind, the analysis presented here explores the prevalence of decoupling in the U.S. affordable housing industry and considers how, when, and why it occurs, and to what effect. Thematic analysis of interview data collected from industry practitioners suggests decoupling is common, comes in multiple forms, and must be effectively managed if municipal governments hope to partner with for-profit and nonprofit affordable housing providers to achieve their social policy goals.
- To Change or Not to Change: The Informativeness of REIT Annual ReportsCashman, George D.; Harrison, David M.; Sheng, Hainan; Wall, Joseph (Taylor & Francis, 2024-05-21)Increasingly similar corporate disclosures may fail to provide potential investors with adequate information about a company to facilitate astute, informed, and/or rational decision making. In light of this repeatedly expressed SEC concern, the current investigation uses a sample of 1,910 annual report (10-k) filings by 234 separate equity REITs from 2000-2020 to examine the impact of year-over-year linguistic similarity on the perceived information content of corporate disclosures. Consistent with the aforementioned concerns, we document a significant increase in the degree of REIT annual report similarity over time. Despite this trend, we find that innovations in annual report disclosures remain directly related to observable changes in both the operational complexity and financial position of the firm. Furthermore, these innovations engender significant market reactions including changes in options trading activity, annual report readability, and the firm’s cost of equity capital. Lastly, these findings are both robust to the inclusion of alternative information channels and are significantly more pronounced within informationally opaque market settings. In sum, we find REIT annual reports remain a value-relevant source of information for market participants.
- Early Warning Systems, Mobile Technology, and Cholera Aversion: Evidence from Rural BangladeshPakhtigian, Emily L.; Aziz, Sonia; Boyle, Kevin J.; Akanda, Ali S.; Hanifi, M. A. (Elsevier, 2024-05)In Bangladesh, cholera poses a significant environmental health risk. Yet, information about the severity of cholera risk is limited as risk varies over time and changing weather patterns make historical cholera risk predictions less reliable. In this paper, we examine how households use geographically and temporally personalized cholera risk predictions to inform their beliefs and behaviors related to cholera and its aversion. We estimate how access to a smartphone application containing monthly cholera risk predictions unique to a user’s home location affects households’ beliefs about their cholera risk and their water use and hygiene behaviors. We find that households with access to this application feel more equipped to respond to environmental and health risks and reduce their reliance on surface water for bathing and washing – a common cholera transmission pathway. We do not find that households invest additional resources into drinking water treatment, nor do we find reductions in self-reported cholera incidence. Further, households with a static, non-personalized app containing public health information about cholera exhibit similar patterns of beliefs updating. Taken together, our results suggest that access to risk information can help households make safer water choices, yet improving design and credibility remain important dimensions for increasing application usability.
- Early Warning Systems, Mobile Technology, and Cholera Aversion: Evidence from Rural BangladeshPakhtigian, Emily L.; Aziz, Sonia; Boyle, Kevin J.; Akanda, Ali S.; Hanifi, M. A. (Resources for the Future, 2022-10)In Bangladesh, cholera poses a significant health risk. Yet, information about the nature and severity of cholera risk is limited as risk varies over time and by location and changing weather patterns have made historical cholera risk predictions less reliable. In this paper, we examine how households use geographically and temporally personalized cholera risk predictions to inform their water use behaviors. Using data from an eight month field experiment, we estimate how access to a smartphone application containing monthly cholera risk predictions unique to a user’s home location affects households’ knowledge about their cholera risk as well as their water use practices. We find that households with access to this application feel more equipped to respond to environmental and health risks they may face and reduce their reliance on surface water for bathing and washing—a common cholera transmission pathway. We do not find that households invest additional resources into drinking water treatment, nor do we find reductions in self-reported cholera incidence. Access to dynamic risk information can help households make safer water choices; tailoring information provision to those at highest risk could reduce cholera transmission in endemic areas.
- Regional Variation in Transaction Costs, Mortgage Rate Heterogeneity, and Mortgage Refinancing BehaviorKiefer, Leonard C.; Kiefer, Hua; Mayock, Tom (Elsevier, 2023)Recent work has demonstrated that the U.S. mortgage market is characterized by significant heterogeneity in the interest rates that are offered to borrowers as well as mortgage refinancing behavior. In this study we contribute to the mortgage heterogeneity literature by providing the first systematic analysis of regional differences in transaction costs in the mortgage market. Using the Uniform Closing Database—a unique repository of loan-level closing cost information—we demonstrate that there is a tremendous amount of regional variation in transaction costs in the mortgage market, most of which is driven by differences in local mortgage stamp taxes and recording fees. In the second part of our paper, we take up the question of how failing to account for such heterogeneity might affect studies of borrower behavior in the mortgage market. We do so through the lens of the failure-to-refinance literature on optimal refinancing activity. Accounting for rate and closing cost heterogeneity significantly reduces estimates of suboptimal refinancing behavior, particularly among borrowers with high-risk credit profiles and those living in states with high closing costs. Because regional variation in closing costs is driven by the state and municipal policies, our results suggest that local governments play a role in the pass through of monetary policy via the mortgage market that has not been previously documented. Our findings also provide a potential mechanism above and beyond the home equity channel that could explain regional variation in refinancing activity and consumer spending during recoveries.
- Property value effects of the Hemlock wooly adelgid infestation in New England, USALi, Xiaoshu; Boyle, Kevin J.; Preisser, Evan L.; Holmes, Thomas P.; Orwig, David (Elsevier, 2022-04)We investigate residential property-price effects of the spread of the Hemlock wooly adelgid infestation northward through central portions of Connecticut and Massachusetts, USA. We find that hemlock trees and the accompanying adelgid infestation within 0.1 km buffers of properties affect sale prices, but the results do not extend to buffers of 0.5 and 1.0 km's. Further, within the 0.1 km buffer, only the healthiest hemlock trees contribute positively to property values. We investigated the robustness of the results to three data interpolation methods, Kriging, Inverse Distance Weighting and Spline, and while there was some minor difference in outcomes the results are robust to these interpolation methods. Two property-price models were estimated, a traditional hedonic model with spatial fixed effects and a repeat sale model. The models provide substantially different property-price impacts and care needs to be taken when interpreting these estimates. Both approaches are limited but in different ways; the hedonic by potentially omitted variables and the repeat-sales by a limited number of observations. Our results provide some support for the repeat-sale model as the hedonic model with spatial fixed effects underperformed when both models were estimated using the same data.