Corporate Governance and Performance: The REIT Effect
利用独特数据库研究美国REITs的公司治理与绩效关系，发现仅在低派息率REITs中治理显著影响企业价值，而全样本中治理与绩效正相关，表明房地产行业治理与绩效关系弱可能源于REIT效应。
Real estate investment trusts (REITs) offer a natural experiment in corporate governance due to the fact that they leave little free cash flow for management, which reduces agency problems. We exploit a unique and leading corporate governance database to test whether corporate governance matters for the performance of U.S. REITs. We document for a sample including governance ratings of more than 220 REITs that firm value is significantly related to firm-level governance for REITs with low payout ratios only. Repeating the analysis with the complete database that includes more than 5,000 companies and a control sample of firms with high corporate real estate ratios, we find a strong and significantly positive relation between our governance index and several performance variables, indicating that the partial lack of a relation between governance and performance in the real estate sector might be explained by a REIT effect.