Real property

Abstract: If economics is about the allocation of resources, then what is the most precious resource in our new information economy? Certainly not information, for we are drowning in it No, what we are short of is the attention to make sense of that information With all the verve and erudition that have established his earlier books as classics, Richard A Lanham, here, traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded In an economy of attention, style and substance change places The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world - not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts Lanham's "The Electronic Word" was one of the earliest and most influential books on new electronic culture "The Economics of Attention" builds on the best insights of that seminal book to map the new frontier that information technologies have created

Abstract: Megacity growth in the developing world is fueled by a desire to access their large local labor markets. Growing megacities suffer from high levels of traffic congestion and pollution, which degrade local quality of life. Transportation technology that allows individuals to access the megacity without living within its boundaries offers potentially large social benefits, because individuals can enjoy the benefits of urban agglomeration while not paying megacity real estate rents and suffering from the city’s social costs. This paper presents evidence supporting the claim that China’s bullet trains are playing this role. The bullet train is regarded as one of the most significant technological breakthroughs in passenger transportation developed in the second half of the 20th century. Starting in 2007, China has introduced several new bullet trains that connect megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou with nearby cities. Through facilitating market integration, bullet trains will stimulate the development of second- and third-tier cities. By offering households and firms a larger menu of location alternatives, bullet trains help to protect the quality of life of the growing urban population. We document that this transport innovation is associated with rising real estate prices in the nearby secondary cities.

Abstract: We analyze monthly returns on an equally weighted index of eighteen to twenty-three equity (real property) real estate investment trusts (REITs) that were traded on major stock exchanges over the 1973–87 period. We employ a multifactor Arbitrage Pricing Model using prespecified macroeconomic factors. We also test whether equity REIT returns are related to changes in the discount on closed-end stock funds, which seems plausible given the closed-end nature of REITs. Three factors, and the percentage change in the discount on closed-end stock funds, consistently drive equity REIT returns: unexpected inflation and changes in the risk and term structures of interest rates. The impacts of these variables on equity REIT returns is around 60% of the impacts on corporate stock returns generally. As expected, the impacts are greater for more heavily levered REITs than for less levered REITs. Real estate, at least as measured by the return performance of equity REITs, is less risky than stocks generally, but does not offer a superior risk-adjusted return and is not a hedge against unexpected inflation.