Gregory H. Chun

New Place‐to‐Place Housing Price Indexes for U.S. Metropolitan Areas, and Their Determinants

Housing prices vary widely from market to market in the United States. The purpose of this study is to (1) construct new place-to-place indexes of the price of housing, using the 1990 Census, and (2) analyze the determinants of housing prices, with a particular focus on the supply side determinants-regulatory and natural constraint-as well as the usual demand determinants. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Pension Plan Real Estate Investment in an Asset/Liability Framework

This study explores the role of pension-plan real estate investment in an asset-liability framework. By assuming that the pension-plan manager wishes to have assets of at least equal value to the liabilities at all points in time, an asset selection process is derived which depends on both the assets covariance with other assets and its covariance with the liability stream. We generally find real estate not to be highly correlated with pension-plan liabilities. This finding is of general interest, since it helps to explain why pension-plan real estate investment is extremely limited and much smaller than one would expect if pension-plan investors cared only about the mean and variance of the real return to their invested wealth. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

The Role of Real Estate in an Institutional Investor's Portfolio Revisited

Many papers have recently pointed out that institutional investors allocate only a very small fraction of their portfolio to real estate, much smaller than theory would dictate. This raises the question, are institutional investors underinvested in real estate equities? Or do we simply have the wrong priors? This paper is an attempt to provide some new insights into this asset allocation paradox. The key conclusions of the paper are several: First, unlike other assets, it would appear that real estate, and real estate diversification, pays off at the very time when the benefits are most needed, that is, when consumption growth opportunities are low. Second, real estate returns are predictable. In fact, the amount of predictability in real estate returns appears to be about the same as in stock returns. Third, real estate performs well in an asset-liability framework. Fourth, the chance of experiencing a large loss on real estate over a long horizon is quite small. We also report here that private sector commercial real estate investments represent between 6 and 12 percent of investable wealth in the United States. Thus, it follows (if one believes the capital asset pricing model) that if institutional investors were to invest more in real estate (up to 12 percent of their assets), they should be able to eliminate nonmarket or unique risk. All of this leaves us a bit dumbfounded as to why institutional investors hold only between 2 and 3 percent of their assets in real estate.