Essays On Transparency Systemic Risk And Liquidity In Real Estate Markets

This dissertation consists of three essays on transparency, systemic risk, and liquidity in real estate markets. The first essay proposes a benchmark portfolio that contains property markets with a higher level of pre-trade transparency to assess expected returns in opaque commercial real estate markets. We find empirical evidence of abnormal returns in opaque markets relative to the benchmark portfolio. Based on pre-trade transparency, we test for information-based co-movements between transparent and less transparent property markets. Revealed post-trade information of how changes in macroeconomic fundamentals affect the valuation of commercial real estate in transparent markets leads to spillover effects to less transparent markets. We also test for learning externalities from the benchmark portfolio to opaque markets. These externalities can be related to different learning-based investment strategies such as cultural familiarity or information advantages from specializing in opaque markets. The second essay analyzes systemic risk in financial center office markets. Based on the expected capital shortfall of financial institutions, we compute the total systemic risk in the banking sector of financial centers. We show that cross-sectional dependence and return co-movements among financial center office markets arise due to the systemic banking sector risk during financial turmoil periods. As crisis periods, we use the dotcom bubble burst in 2001 and the recent financial crisis 2007/2008. Exploiting spatial econometrics, we test for return co-movements among office markets during normal times as a placebo test and among counterfactual retail markets. We also show that the decline in office market returns during financial turmoil is larger in financial centers compared to non-financial centers. The last essay analyzes the impact of nearby located urban agglomeration centers on local rental housing market liquidity. The empirical.