Optimal Real Estate Portfolios

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid the problem of analyzing, evaluating and selecting real estate investments within the context of a portfolio. Most approaches simply attempt to adapt existing theory and models from the well-developed literature of securities investments. Most adaptations or extensions to real estate are not without serious problems, however, because of several fundamental difficulties relating to optimization technology inadequacies and a general lack of reliable and consistent market data.
This article deals with the major problems of utilizing some of the classic securities investment models for real estate. Further, a risk-return model is advanced which overcomes most of the fundamental problems outlined earlier in the article.     

Excess supply equilibria

This paper addresses a fundamental problem in economic theory: How can there be equilibria of the economic system where some commodity is in excess supply, yet that commodity's relative price shows no tendency to fall? Of course, the principal example of such a phenomenon is an economy experiencing a prolonged period of involuntary unemployment of the labor force during which there is no significant change in the real wage.In the following pages, I shall describe a two-commodity, general equilibrium model that has a continuum of unemployment equilibria, one for any given unemployment rate. The important feature of this model is that workers establish their wage rates in an attempt to maximize expected utility. The information upon which these wage setting decisions are based is provided by actual labor market transactions.Despite the voluntary nature of the wage setting decision, I shall argue that each equilibrium of this economy exhibits involuntary unemployment in the Keynesian sense. For there will always be another equilibrium with a lower real wage, a higher level of employment, and at which (at least when workers are risk neutral) each worker achieves a higher level of expected utility.     

SELECTIVITY,MARKET TIMING,AND RANDOM BETA BEHAVIOR OF MUTUAL FUNDS: A GENERALIZED MODEL

This paper presents a generalized varying parameter model to investigate the performance of mutual funds. The model allows beta nonstationarity to include both market timing and random beta behavior; therefore, it can be regarded as a general case of previous research. Forty-three funds with a wide range of objectives are examined. The generalized varying parameter results indicate that about 30 percent of the funds show selectivity, 19 percent have random betas, and 14 percent indicate significant, yet negative, market timing performance. Therefore, mutual funds, as a group, show no market timing ability. The apparent ability to select undervalued securities, however, seems to conflict with the efficient markets hypothesis.