WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE PAST: A COMMON PRE-EXISTING SYMPTOM OF THREE RECENT REAL ESTATE PRICING BUBBLES

JANUARY 2010

This study puts forth a holistic framework incorporating the supply and demand for money and credit, risk premiums, and expected income growth to consolidate and interconnect the various causes of the three (Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States) most recent and dramatic international real estate bubbles. Findings indicate a common pre-existing symptom (the presence of negative real interest rates) across all three events. This finding should help future policy makers in determining the existence of on-coming asset pricing bubbles.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF HOUSEHOLD DEMAND AND HOUSING MARKET TRENDS IN CHINA

FEBRUARY 2012

China has consistently experienced 10% annual economic growth for about three decades and has became the second largest economy. As the monetary system of China is relatively closed and isolated the Chinese economy and its housing market has not been much affected by international financial crises. The chapter gives a brief overview of the development of the housing market and the evolution of housing policy in China. It also introduces the dramatic scale of recent house price inflation in the cities and explains government monetary policy toward dampening it down. The chapter assesses the potential reasons for the rise in house prices over the past decade including demographic factors, rising incomes and the role of capital markets and monetary policy. The analysis is based on five representative cities from different regions.

A TENANT-MIX MODEL FOR SHOPPING MALLS

MARCH 2012

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to develop a novel tenant mix model for shopping malls based on an analogy from ecological theories. Design/methodology/approach ‐ This study empirically investigates the tenant species-area relationship and tenant species-abundance distribution in shopping malls. In this study, the tests on species-area relationship and species-abundance distribution in shopping malls are derived from ecological theories. Empirical tests by a sample of 18 shopping malls for the species-area relationship and of five malls for the species-abundance distribution are carried out in Hong Kong Findings ‐ It shows that, in line with the findings of biogeography, the tenant species-area relationship follows a power law of exponent of about 0.20. Furthermore, the species-abundance distributions of the five large-scale malls are found to be closely in track with a geometric distribution as commonly found in ecology. These results imply that tenant mix strategies are governed by two principles: the number of tenant species is related to the mall size; and the shop area allocation follows a geometric distribution. Research limitations/implications ‐ The study provides the first quantitative tenant mix model on the number of tenant species in a particular mall size, and on the tenant species abundance distribution pattern. These results provide far-reaching implications for research and practice, including a quantitative benchmarking of tenant mix strategy and an optimal design of shopping malls. Practical implications ‐ The model is the first tenant mix model for practitioners to formulate quantitative tenant mix strategy, and evaluate the effects of tenant mix on the performance of a shopping mall. Originality/value ‐ It is the first quantitative model for tenant mix, and would open up a novel agenda for research on tenant mix strategies.

THE IMPACTS OF TAX REFORMS ON REITS. AN INTERNATIONAL EMPIRICAL STUDY

MARCH 2017

Tax exemption is one of the REIT’s most unique characteristics. To improve the development of REITs market, the Congress had passed several Tax Reform Acts. Plenty of previous study had already explored the effects of tax legislation changing on REITs market. However the findings had not come to consensus. This might because most of them explored this topic by event study, which cannot control other events happening on the even dates. This paper tries to avoid the complications encountered in previous research by investigating the tax reform effects through the normal panel model with the data in the United States and then retest the hypothesis by a novel empirical model with panel market data in both U.S. and Australia. The results provide evidence that the Tax Reforms would truly affect the REIT’s performance with more solid empirical evidences. Furthermore, the results shed light on the tax policy and governance of a REITs market.