Real estate investment in global financial centers: risk, return and contagion

Global financial activity is heavily concentrated in a small number of world cities –international financial centers. The office markets in those cities receive significant flows of investment capital. The growing specialization of activity in IFCs and innovations in real estate investment vehicles lock developer, occupier, investment, and finance markets together, creating common patterns of movement and transmitting shocks from one office market throughout the system. International real estate investment strategies that fail to recognize this common source of volatility and risk may fail to deliver the diversification benefits sought.

Stakeholder-defined corporate responsibility for a pre-credit-crunch financial service company: lessons for how good reputations are won and lost

This paper presents a study that identifies a stakeholder-defined concept of Corporate Responsibility (CR) in the context of a UK financial service organisation in the immediate pre-credit crunch era. From qualitative analysis of interviews and focus groups with employees and customers, we identify, in a wide-ranging stakeholder-defined concept of CR, six themes that together imply two necessary conditions for a firm to be regarded as responsible— both corporate actions and character must be consonant with CR. This provides both empirical support for a notable, recent theoretical contribution by Godfrey (in Acad Manag Rev 30:777–798, 2005) and novel lessons for reputation management practice.

The impact of 9/11 on US REIT returns: fundamental or financial?

Following the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 volatility of daily returns of the US stock market rose sharply. This increase in volatility may reflect fundamental changes in the economic determinants of prices such as expected earnings, interest rates, real growth and inflation. Alternatively, the increase in volatility may simply reflect the effects of increased uncertainty in the financial markets. This study therefore sets out to determine if the effects of the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 had a fundamental or purely financial impact on US real estate returns. In order to do this we compare pre- and post-9/11 crisis returns for a number of US REIT indexes using an approach suggested by French and Roll (1986), as extended by Tuluca et al (2003). In general we find no evidence that the effects of 9/11 had a fundamental effect on REIT returns. In other words, we find that the effect of the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 had only a financial effect on REIT returns and therefore was transitory.