Economic Fundamentals, Capital Expenditures and Asset Dispositions Brent W. Ambrose ∗ Eva Steinery November 27, 2017 Abstract Research on the disposition effect in real assets to date ignores the active management component of these investments. Active management notably includes decisions about follow-up investment in the form of capital expenditures, as well as dispositions. Using a real option framework, we develop testable hypotheses and provide empirical evidence for the relationships between economic fundamentals, capital expenditures, property values, and the subsequent likelihood of sale. Our results shed new light on the evidence for the disposition effect in real estate. ∗Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, 381 Business Building, University Park, PA 16802 (e-mail:
[email protected]). yCorresponding author: School of Hotel Administration, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, 465B Statler Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853 (email:
[email protected]). We are thankful for comments from Robert Connolly, Davi Geltner, David Ling, Crocker Liu, Tim Riddiough, Jacob Sagi, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Susan Wachter, as well as seminar participants at the RERI Research Conference 2017 and the AREUEA National Meeting 2017. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Real Estate Research Institute (RERI). We are also grateful to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries for providing the data used in this study. 1 The disposition effect denotes a behavioral bias leading investors to hold poorly performing investments to avoid realizing losses.1 It was first documented in financial assets such as stocks and mutual funds (Coval and Shumway, 2005; Dhar and Zhu, 2006; Frazzini, 2006; Ivković, Poterba, and Weisbenner, 2005; Odean, 1998).