Mobilising Urban Policies: The Policy Transfer of US Business Improvement Districts to England and Wales

This paper examines the ways in which policies are transferred between places: how they are disembedded from, and re-embedded into, new political, economic and social contexts. To do this, the paper will draw upon a case study of the transfer of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) from the US to England and Wales. Within this, the paper demonstrates how they were a response to fiscal problems facing city-centre management in England and Wales; how US BIDs were socially constructed as `successful' and `transferable'; and how the BID `model' was reshaped prior to and following its rolling-out in England and Wales. The paper concludes by stressing six wider conceptual points about the nature of urban policy transfer

An Investigation of the Change in Real Estate Investment Trust Betas

The betas on equity real estate investment trusts (EREITs) have undergone a structural shift in the past 20 years. We show that this is the result of the lower variability of EREIT returns and argue that the decrease in the standard deviation of EREIT returns can be attributed to the increasing levels of information about EREITs. We find that the number of analysts following the EREITs industry, as measured by IBES, can significantly explain the drop in the standard deviation for most EREITs. This was also found to be the case for another proxy for the level of information-the trading volume of the EREIT index. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.