On the Capital Structure of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)

Much of the literature on capital structure excludes Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) due mainly to the unique regulatory environment of these firms. As such, the issue of how REITs choose among different financing options when they raise external capital is largely unexplored. In this paper, we explore two issues on the capital structure of REITs: is there a relationship between market-to-book and leverage ratios, and, is the relationship between market-to-book and leverage ratio temporary or persistent. Our results suggest that REITs with historically high market-to-book ratio tend to have persistently high leverage ratio. In essence, REITs with high growth opportunity and high market valuation raise funds through debt issues. This finding, which is robust to various specifications and econometric tests, is contrary to the financing decisions of non-regulated firms. We attribute it to the special regulatory environment of REITs where, despite no apparent benefits to debt financing, management issues debt. Comments from Robert Edelstein and others at the Maastricht–Cambridge 2005 Symposium, and an anonymous referee are gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors are our own.     

Joint Leverage and Maturity Choices in Real Estate Firms: The Role of the REIT Status

We explore the interdependence of leverage and debt maturity choices in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and unregulated listed real estate investment companies in the U.S. for the period 1973-2011. We find that the leverage and maturity choices of all listed real estate firms are interdependent, but in contrast to industrial firms, they are not made simultaneously. Across the different types of real estate firms considered, we find substantial differences in the nature of the relationship between leverage and maturity. Leverage determines maturity in non-REITs, whereas maturity is a determinant of leverage in REITs. We suggest that the observed differences reflect the effects of the REIT regulation, rather than solely being a function of real estate as the underlying asset class. We also present novel evidence that the relationship between leverage and maturity in both firm types can be used to moderate the effects of other exogenous financing policies.     

An Analysis of the Financing Decisions of REITs: The Role of Market Timing and Target Leverage

This paper examines the role of capital market conditions and target leverage on the marginal financing decisions of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), which include both capital raising and capital reduction activities. We investigate the relevance of a hybrid hypothesis whereby REITs have target leverage, but they also choose and time their marginal financing decisions according to the capital market conditions. The empirical results suggest that target leverage behavior plays a secondary role to market timing behavior in the financing decisions of REITs. In particular, we find strong and consistent evidence that REITs exhibit market timing behavior in terms of when and what type of capital to issue or reduce. Such market timing practices, motivated by attempts to take advantage of capital market conditions, may shift the firms away from their target leverage. However, we observe that in the long run, most REITs do move their capital structure towards the target debt level.     

Property Segment and REIT Capital Structure

This paper relies on an increasing number of industry equilibrium studies linking a firm to its industry peers to help explain the observed REIT capital structure variation within property segments beyond what is possible with the traditional partial equilibrium trade-off and pecking order theories, which assume that each firm operates in isolation from other market participants and are not particularly suitable to REITs because of the regulated setting within which these firms operate. We build several proxies for a REIT’s position within its property segment. Consistent with the competitive equilibrium model of Maksimovic and Zechner (1991), we find that a REIT’s volatility of operating performance relative to the median volatility of operating performance of its segment peers is an important determinant of its leverage ratio. We also find that a REIT’s leverage ratio depends on the median leverage ratio in its segment. Leverage is also related to a REIT’s status as an incumbent and its role as a leader in the property segment.     

How Entrenchment, Incentives and Governance Influence REIT Capital Structure

Although recent literature has confirmed the importance of viewing a firm??s capital structure choices of leverage and debt maturity as jointly determined, to date there has been little analysis of the importance of traditional governance variables on a firm??s capital structure decisions using a simultaneous equations approach. We examine the influence of managerial incentives, traditional managerial monitoring mechanisms and managerial entrenchment on the capital structure of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). Using panel data, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations for leverage and maturity and find that firms with entrenched CEOs use less leverage and shorter maturity debt. This is consistent with the expectation that managers acting in their own self interest will choose lower leverage to reduce liquidity risk and use short maturity debt to preserve their ability to enhance their compensation and reputations by empire building. We also find evidence that traditional alignment mechanisms such as equity and option ownership have an offsetting effect; and that firms where the founder serves as CEO choose higher leverage and longer maturity debt. The results also provide evidence that leverage and maturity are substitutes, firms with high profitability and growth opportunities use less leverage and firms with liquid assets use more leverage and longer maturity debt.     

Leverage and Taxes: Evidence from the Real Estate Industry

Finance theory has long viewed corporate income taxes as a potentially important determinant of corporate financing decisions and capital structures. But finance academics have been unable to provide convincing empirical evidence of a material effect of taxes on corporate leverage, in part because of difficulties in constructing an effective proxy for marginal corporate tax rates, and hence for the tax benefits of debt, for large samples of individual companies. The authors address this by analyzing leverage decisions in an industry whose publicly traded entities are organized either as taxable corporations, or as real estate investment trusts (REITs) that effectively avoid entity level taxation. This enables them to measure the relative tax benefits of debt with greater precision while controlling for important nontax characteristics that affect debt usage. The tax hypothesis predicts that for real estate firms with similar asset portfolios, taxable firms should have more debt than their nontaxable counterparts. Both the nontaxable and the taxable real estate firms in our sample routinely have more than twice the leverage of industrial firms, which suggests that factors other than taxes are contributing to their use of debt. But among real estate firms, tax status appears to play a much weaker role. Taxable firms have significantly more leverage only after 2000, when restrictions on REITs were removed through new regulations that made their operations much more like those of taxable real estate firms. Our findings also depend on real estate characteristics—most notably, only residential real estate firms demonstrated differences that are consistent with the tax hypothesis. Taken together, the authors’ findings suggest that although taxes do seem to matter, their role is clearly secondary relative to factors such as the nature of the firm’s assets. A generous interpretation of our evidence puts the effect of taxes between one‐third and one‐half of that implied by prior research.     

CEO's Inside Debt and Dynamics of Capital Structure

Debt‐type compensation (inside debt) exacerbates the divergence in risk preferences between the chief executive officer (CEO) and shareholders and, in turn, affects capital structure decisions. An excessively risk‐averse CEO tends to use less debt than the shareholders desire, reduce debt quickly when the firm is overlevered, but is reluctant to increase debt when the firm is underlevered. We find that higher CEO's inside debt ratio (i.e., inside debt as a percentage of total incentive compensation) is associated with lower firm leverage and faster (slower) leverage adjustments toward the shareholders’ desired level for overlevered (underlevered) firms. The CEO's inside debt ratio most conducive to capital structure rebalancing is around 10% of the firm's market debt ratio.     

Capital Structure and Political Risk in Asia-Pacific Real Estate Markets

This study investigates the determinants of capital structure decisions by real estate firms, with a specific focus on the impact of political risk on leverage. Using a sample of Asia-Pacific REITs and listed property trusts, we find those firms with properties located in countries characterized by relatively high degrees of political risk, such as political instability, and/or greater uncertainty in the ability to repatriate and monetize profits from international investment activities, employ less debt than their counterparts operating in more politically stable environments. This core finding remains robust to alternative sample selection criteria including the division of the sample into high versus low market-to-book value firms, and also holds within the subset of organizations that are active in raising additional capital in the secondary markets.     

Balance Sheet Management: The Case of Short-Term Obligations Reclassified as Long-Term Debt

We investigate potential management of balance sheet ratios by a sample of firms that reclassify short-term obligations to long-term debt and subsequently declassify that debt (return it to the current liability section). Although aggregate measures of liabilities and equity remain unchanged when firms reclassify (declassify), the practice does increase (decrease) reported measures of liquidity, such as the current ratio, and long-term leverage. Our results suggest that firms reclassify and declassify to smooth reported liquidity and leverage, relative to the prior year and to industry benchmarks. Our evidence is also consistent with firms working around restrictive debt covenants.     

Local social environment and the speed of leverage adjustment

This study examines the impact of social capital on firms’ leverage adjustment speed. Using a comprehensive dataset of 83,374 firm-year observations for 744 US counties for 1990–2016, we find that both underleveraged and overleveraged firms located in US counties with higher levels of social capital incur slower leverage adjustment towards their optimal target capital structure. This finding is robust to alternative measures of leverage and social capital, different model specifications, controlling for county- and firm-level characteristics, and endogeneity. We further identify two mechanisms through which social capital affects leverage adjustments: monitoring (channel for underleveraged firms) and disciplinary (channel for overleveraged firms) mechanisms.     

Bank Mergers,REIT Loan Pricing and Takeover Likelihood

The impact of bank mergers on Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) loan pricing and takeover likelihood is assessed. REITs that lose their primary banking relationship due to bank mergers pay higher interest rates on future borrowings. Bank consolidation reduces bank competition for REIT loans which affects loan pricing. Moreover, based on randomly matched samples of REITs, the results imply that firms losing their agent banks due to bank mergers and those with limited access to bank debt are more likely to be acquired while REITs associated with acquiring banks are more likely to acquire other firms. Additional analysis of the 92 merged REITs reveals that 33% of the target REITs’ banks are merged with their REIT acquirers’ banks prior to the REIT mergers while 67% of the target REITs share at least one major bank with their acquirer.     

Bond Market Access,Credit Quality,and Capital Structure: Canadian Evidence

We examine the impact of bond market access (measured by having a credit rating) on leverage for Canadian high credit quality (HQ) and low credit quality (LQ) firms, and find that the leverage impact is more pronounced for LQ firms. The results are similar for U.S. firms. Our results are confirmed when we control for the firm's credit quality, examine the change in leverage around rating initiation, and account for the issue size effect. A similar leverage impact for Canadian and U.S. LQ firms suggests that the Canada‐U.S. bond market integration has mitigated the financial constraints for Canadian LQ firms.     

The impact of debt on market reactions to the revaluation of noncurrent assets

This study provides evidence that noncurrent asset revaluations are differentially considered by market participants based on the level of debt in the capital structure. Contracting theory (e.g. Brown et al., Abacus 28 (1992) 36) implies that revaluations made by firms with high-debt levels may be viewed as being opportunistic, while revaluations for firms with low-debt levels may be viewed as reducing information asymmetry between the firm and capital providers. For a sample of New Zealand firm/years that excludes certain observations with extreme stock returns, we find that revaluations of fixed assets are more value-relevant for firms with low leverage than for firms with high leverage. This suggests that the value relevance of fixed asset valuations depends on management's motivation for making the revaluation. The results of the research should be considered within certain limitations such as a small sample.     

REIT Splits and Dividend Changes: Tests of Signaling and Information Substitutability

Recent work on stock splits have attempted to relate the information value associated with splits with that from dividends signaling. This paper extends this genre of research by evaluating the issue of dividend predictability using REIT data where the self-selection issue associated with dividend payment is minimized. The use of REIT data also eliminates the “differential expectations” effect for non-dividend paying firms, thus rendering a more robust test of the information substitutability hypothesis postulated by Nayak and Prabhala (2001). To the extent that stock splits are signals of future cash flows, we further examine the question of leverage predictability associated with REIT splits, particularly for highly levered firms. We find that REITs that use dividend changes as a signaling mechanism prior to splits have smaller price responses to the private information revealed by splits than those that do not provide such signals, consistent with the notion that dividends and splits are indeed information substitutes. Further, REIT splits provide useful information about future dividend and leverage changes.     

Efficiency,Scale Economies,and the Risk/Return Performance of Real Estate Investment Trusts

Estimates from a directional output distance function are used to construct a risk/return frontier that defines the best-practice management technology for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). We model REIT performance as a production process in which each REIT produces a desirable output (return) and an undesirable output (risk) using inputs of managerial effort and financial capital. The results suggest that ignoring the effects of risk yields a management technology that is significantly different from one that incorporates risk. In addition, market valuation is inversely related to inefficiency and directly related to leverage.     

PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY,NONDEBT TAX SHIELDS,AND FINANCIAL LEVERAGE

In the literature a negative relationship between debt and nondebt tax shields is predicted only for firms that have the same production technology (i.e., firms with perfectly correlated pretax output). In this paper we examine the relationship between production technology and differences in firms' financial leverage ratios, and find that firms in the same industry with highly (lowly) correlated output make similar (dissimilar) leverage decisions. Thus, the correlation of output across states of nature helps explain leverage differences that are not explained by industry differences. Contrary to previous predictions, however, leverage differences for firms with highly correlated pretax output suggest a positive relationship between debt and nondebt tax shields.     

On the relation between the market-to-book ratio, growth opportunity, and leverage ratio

The negative relation between the market-to-book ratio and leverage ratio is one of the most widely documented empirical regularities in the capital structure literature. Most related studies take this negative relation as given and debate about its economic interpretation. We show that firms with higher market-to-book ratios face lower debt financing costs and borrow more. The relation between the market-to-book ratio and leverage ratio is not monotonic and is positive for most firms (more than 88% of COMPUSTAT firms and more than 95% of total market capitalization). The previously documented negative relation is driven by a subset of firms with high market-to-book ratios.     

Management compensation contracts and distribution policies in the US technology sector

This paper examines the impact of executive compensation practices on (a) the decision to distribute and (b) the distribution channel employed by companies from the US technology sector. We report that firms that compensate their managers using executive stock options (ESOs) tend to distribute less and firms that use stock awards make more distributions. When we simultaneously examine the distribution and the channel used, we find firms using ESOs restrict their dividend payments but their propensity for stock repurchases is unaffected. Firms using stock awards to compensate managers make greater distributions across all channels. We also provide strong evidence in favour of the agency and leverage explanations for distributions.     

The Net Benefits to Leverage

I estimate the market's valuation of the net benefits to leverage using panel data from 1994 to 2004, identified from market values and betas of a company's debt and equity. The median firm captures net benefits of up to 5.5% of firm value. Small and profitable firms have high optimal leverage ratios, as predicted by theory, but in contrast to existing empirical evidence. Companies are on average slightly underlevered relative to the optimal leverage ratio at refinancing. This result is mainly due to zero leverage firms. I also look at implications for financial policy.     

Leverage change,debt overhang,and stock prices

We document a significant and negative effect of the change in a firm's leverage ratio on its stock prices. We find that the negative effect is stronger for firms that have higher leverage ratios, higher likelihood of default, and face more severe financial constraints. Moreover, firms with an increase in leverage ratio tend to have less future investment. These findings are consistent with Myers' (1977) debt overhang theory that an increase in leverage may lead to future underinvestment, thus reducing a firm's value.