Unexpected Inflation, Capital Structure And Real Risk-Adjusted Firm Performance

Managers can improve real risk-adjusted firm performance by matching nominal assets with nominal liabilities, thereby reducing the sensitivity of real risk-adjusted returns to unexpected inflation. The Net Asset Value (NAV) of US equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) serves as a good proxy for nominal assets and accordingly we use a sample of US REITs to test our hypothesis. We find that for the firms in our sample: (i) their real, risk-adjusted performance, and (ii) their inflation hedging qualities are inversely related to deviations from this “matching-nominals argument. In addition to providing managers with a vehicle to maximise real, risk-adjusted performance, our findings also provide investors with the tools to infer inflation-hedging qualities of equity investments

Fundamental Drivers of Dependence in REIT Returns

We analyse the empirical relationships between firm fundamentals and the dependence structure between individual REIT and stock market returns. In contrast to previous studies, we distinguish between the average systematic risk of REITs and their asymmetric risk in the sense of a disproportionate likelihood of joint negative return clusters between REITs and the stock market. We find that REITs with low systematic risk are typically small, with low short-term momentum, low turnover, high growth opportunities and strong long-term momentum. Holding systematic risk constant, the main driving forces of asymmetric risk are leverage and, to some extent, short-term momentum. Specifically, we find that leverage has an asymmetric effect on REIT return dependence that outweighs the extent to which it increases the average sensitivity of REIT equity to market fluctuations, explaining the strong negative impact of leverage on firm performance especially during crisis periods that has been documented in recent empirical work

Unexpected Inflation, Capital Structure, and Real Risk-adjusted Firm Performance

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available fromWiley via https://doi.org/ 10.1111/abac.12102Managers can improve real risk-adjusted firm performance by matching nominal assets with nominal liabilities, thereby reducing the sensitivity of real risk-adjusted returns to unexpected inflation. The Net Asset Value (NAV) of US equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) serves as a good proxy for nominal assets and accordingly we use a sample of US REITs to test our hypothesis. We find that for the firms in our sample: (i) their real, risk-adjusted performance, and (ii) their inflation hedging qualities are inversely related to deviations from this “matching-nominals” argument. In addition to providing managers with a vehicle to maximise real, risk-adjusted performance, our findings also provide investors with the tools to infer inflation-hedging qualities of equity investments