Gianluca Marcato
Professor of Finance and Real Estate
Head of Department, Real Estate and Planning
Director, Certificate in Government Property Leadership
Director, INREV / Henley Certificate in Non-Listed Real Estate Investment
Liquidity Pricing
Liquidity Pricing of Non-Liquid Assets, Working Paper
Forecasting Fund Flows and Liquidity Imbalances (with T. Gabrieli and G. Tira), Working Paper
Publications
Price-Signalling and Return-Chasing: International Evidence from Maturing REIT Markets (with D. Brounen and E. Silvestri)
Real Estate Economics, 2019
Abstract: This article examines the liquidity of international real estate securities across 10 markets over the period 1990–2015. We apply and compare results for four different measures of liquidity, and find that while liquidity has increased consistently, wide variations still exist across markets, with the United States and Japan in the lead. Our results also suggest that the introduction of local REIT regimes did not have any pervasive effects on stock liquidity. When we study the relationship between liquidity and returns, we document new and consistent evidence for international return chasing behavior, whose pattern is a function of local market efficiency, listed real estate market maturity and stock ownership dispersion. The introduction of REIT regimes seems to weaken the importance of extra performance over and above general equity returns as investors tend to allocate funds to real estate securities within real estate rather than equity portfolios.
Liquidity Review: Dimensions, Causes, Measures and Empirical Applications in Real Estate Markets (with F. Ametefe and S. Devaney)
Journal of Real Estate Literature, 2016
Abstract: In this article, we consider how different dimensions of liquidity have been measured in financial markets and for various forms of real estate investment. The purpose of this exercise is to establish the range of liquidity measures that could be used for real estate investments before considering which measures and questions have been investigated so far. Most measures reviewed here are applicable to public real estate, but not all can be applied to private real estate assets or funds. Use of a broader range of liquidity measures could help real estate researchers tackle issues such as quantification of illiquidity premia for the real estate asset class or different types of real estate, and how liquidity differences might be incorporated into portfolio allocation models.
Dynamics of Asset Prices and Transaction Activity in Illiquid Markets: the Case of Private Commercial Real Estate (with D. Ling and P. McAllister)
Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 2009
Abstract: This paper represents a first attempt to employ a macroeconomic approach to explain the high and varying IPO underpricing within a single emerging market. We examine the empirical impact of trade openness on the short-run underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) using city-level data. Particularly, we argue that urban economic openness (UEO) has a significant impact on the productivity and on prices of both direct and indirect real estate due to productivity gains of companies in more open areas. This in turn positively affects the firm’s profitability, enhancing the confidence in local real estate markets and future company performance, hence decreasing the uncertainty of the IPO valuation. As a result, issuers have less incentive to underprice IPO shares. We use a sample of Chinese real estate IPOs, which offer a suitable laboratory thanks to their strong geographic investment patterns focused locally and a country with a highly heterogeneous openness across regions. Controlling for traditional firm- and issuing-specific characteristics of IPOs that are used for developed markets and Chinese-related features (i.e. listing location and state ownership), we find the evidence that companies investing in economically more open areas experience less IPO underpricing. Our results show great explanatory power and are robust to different specifications.
Back from Beyond the Bid-Ask Spread: Estimating Liquidity in International Markets (with C. Ward)
Real Estate Economics, 2007
Abstract: Research on the topic of liquidity has greatly benefited from the improved availability of data. Researchers have addressed questions regarding the factors that influence bid–ask spreads and the relationship between spreads and risk, return and liquidity. Intraday data have been used to measure the effective spread, and researchers have been able to refine the concepts of liquidity to include the price impact of transactions on a trade‐by‐trade analysis. The growth in the creation of tax‐transparent securities has greatly enhanced the visibility of securitized real estate, and has naturally led to the question of whether the increased visibility of real estate has caused market liquidity to change. Although the growth in the public market for securitized real estate has occurred in international markets, it has not been accompanied by universal publication of transaction data. Therefore, this article develops an aggregate daily data‐based test for liquidity and applies the test to U.S. data in order to check for consistency with the results of prior intraday analysis. If the two approaches produce similar results, we can apply the same technique to markets in which less detailed data are available and offer conclusions on the liquidity of a wider set of markets.