Browsing by Author "Chang, Samuel"

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) have provided investors with commercial real estate exposure while retaining the liquidity benefits of traditional equities. Relatively low correlations between REITs and the broader equity market have historically provided portfolio diversification; however, recent studies have shown rising correlations between the asset classes. This study investigates the relationship between credit market conditions and REIT-stock return correlations on a sector level from 1990 to 2024. Identifying the impact of changing credit market conditions and market volatility on REIT-stock return correlations is important for equity investors who seek diversification benefits from REITs amidst tightening credit markets. The REIT sectors examined in this study include healthcare, industrial/office, lodging/resorts, residential, retail, and self-storage. A comprehensive dataset is created using data from the CRSP/Ziman Real Estate Database, Finaeon, and Federal Reserve Economic Data. This study focuses on the effect of the default spread, term spread, mortgage spread, and VIX on sector REIT-stock return correlations. The empirical results suggest that the default spread, term spread, and VIX have the strongest explanatory power for REIT-stock return correlations across all sectors. While sector-specific sensitivities vary, widening default spreads and narrowing term spreads both increase correlations across all sectors. Additionally, when VIX levels spike, correlations increase for all REIT sectors except self-storage, whose correlations decrease. This study offers insights into the dynamic relationship between credit market conditions and REIT-stock return correlations, with implications for portfolio allocation and diversification.

During the ‘90s, the question of culture, its regulation, and its connection with government policy stirred up a fiery political debate centered on artistic decency and the freedom of expression. This era, later recognized as “The Culture Wars,” would highlight an increasing ideological rift between America’s political parties about how to manage and regulate cultural works. After the passing of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, which created two separate endowment funds to support these cultural artworks, the notion of cultural policy and its significance in the policy arena surfaced among policymakers, politicians, and academic researchers. Today, institutions like Princeton University have cultivated a field of academic study in order to encourage more research in this area. Unfortunately, modern cultural policy studies fall short in the level and depth of analysis required for policymakers to both understand the artworks they touch and make the proper decisions regarding funding and regulation. Currently, much effort has focused on quantitatively modeling culture and its various artistic forms, rather than subjectively and qualitatively examining the mediums themselves. This thesis posits a new methodology framework for cultural and even public policy—one that attempts to experience art, wrestle with the discourses and dialogues it may convey, and relay the hidden perspectives that are brought in conversation with historical and modern policy issues. It borrows from the qualitative research designs of education policy and sociology ethnographies in order to show that film, as evidence and data, can be explored like school hallways, conversed with like interviews and conversations, and subjectively experienced like a microcosm of society and the world. Specifically, this thesis uses film analyses of East Asian film in Japan and South Korea in order to reveal dialogues surrounding the influences of foreign and occupation policies on the respective nations. Based on the results of these subjective readings, these films were found to highlight hidden policy issues—issues that the previous cultural policy framework would have never found if not for the explicit and subjective engagement with film. This thesis makes no claim regarding cultural policy practices itself, but rather posits a new understanding as to the way we see the policy field through cinema and artistic mediums. Film and art, and an active and subjective engagement with these materials, then, serve as essential information, data, and sites for future cultural and public policy research.