There are substantial differences in stock market volatility across countries. This paper asks why market volatility differs across countries. Using Datastream Country Indexes covering thirty seven international markets, this paper finds that the education level of investors plays a significant...

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically whether corporate diversification reduces the risk of the diversifying firm. We investigate this issue using a sample of diversifying acquisitions and various risk measures. We find that corporate diversification tends to decrease the...

Using 1994-1995 microeconomic data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), this paper estimates cost and profit X-efficiency levels in the residential real estate brokerage market using traditional and Bayesian stochastic frontier models. We find that firms err more from failure to...

This article examines the productive efficiency levels present in the market for residential real estate brokerage services by employing the stochastic frontier approach. The only prior study (Anderson, Zumpano, Elder and Fok, 1998) that examined productive efficiency in this sector employed...

The US housing market has experienced significant cyclical volatility over the last twenty-five years due to major structural changes and economic fluctuations. In addition, the housing market is generally considered to be weak form inefficient. Houses are relatively illiquid, exceptionally...

Using a stochastic frontier methodology that incorporates Bayesian statistics, this paper analyzes the cost efficiency of real estate investment trusts (REITs) by observing the deviations of the measured costs of individual REITs from a defined efficient cost frontier. Using 1995-97 data, we...

This article measures overall, allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency levels for a sample of residential real estate brokerage firms using data envelopment analysis, a linear-programming technique. The results suggest that real estate brokerage firms operate inefficiently....

How stock price synchronicity mirrors firm-specific information has been a subject of much debate. We posit that price synchronicity can be low in either good or bad firm-specific information environments because stock prices incorporate both public and private information. Using three proxies...