Maastricht-NUS-MIT Conference 2011 and 2012 Introduction to the Special Issue

摘要

This special issue of the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics combines papers of the 2011 conference in Maastricht and the 2012 conference in Singapore. From these two conferences, a total of eight papers were accepted for publication in this special issue. These paper cover three broad topics: REITs, Housing and Housing Finance, and Behavioral Finance. In their paper "Naked Short Selling and the Market Impact of Fails-to-Deliver: Evidence of the Trading of Real Estate Investment Trusts", Erik Devos, Thomas McInish, Michael McKenzie and James Upson put a widely held notion to rest. From early 2007 to the end of 2008, the US REIT market lost more than half of its market capitalization. Received wisdom has it that short selling was partly to blame for this loss. The authors investigate whether short selling and subsequent failures to deliver the REIT stocks thus sold have indeed contributed to this sharp deterioration in REIT returns. The empirical analysis that is the core of the paper suggests that this is not the case, and the authors conclude that short selling and fails-to-deliver did not play an important role in the adverse REIT performance of that period.