This article examines the relation between investor sentiment and returns in private markets. Relative to more liquid public markets, private investment markets exhibit significant limits to arbitrage that restrict an investor's ability to counteract mispricing. Using vector autoregressive models, we find a positive and economically significant relation between investor sentiment and subsequent private market returns. We provide further long-horizon regression evidence suggesting that private commercial real estate markets are susceptible to prolonged periods of sentiment-induced mispricing as the inability to short-sell in periods of overvaluation and restricted access to credit in periods of undervaluation prevents arbitrageurs from entering the market.A growing behavioral approach in the economics and finance literature recognizes the bounded rationality and psychological biases of investors who often rely on and are influenced by computational shortcuts, heuristics, frame dependence and intuition when making decisions in a complicated and uncertain world with market frictions (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky 1982, Barberis andThaler 2003). As a result, changes in asset prices may be driven by more than changes in market fundamentals. 1 Furthermore, these temporary price deviations can persist if there are significant limits to arbitrage as shown theoretically by De Long et al. (1990) and Shleifer and Vishny (1997), among others. Recent empirical research suggests this movement away from

This article examines the effects of geographic portfolio concentrations on the return performance of U.S. public real estate investment trusts versus private commercial real estate over the 1996–2013 time period. Adjusting private market returns for differences in geographic concentrations with public markets, we find that core private market performance falls. Using return performance attribution analysis, we find that the geographic allocation effect constitutes only a small portion of the total return difference between listed and private market returns, whereas individual property selection within geographic locations explains, in part, the documented outperformance of listed versus private real estate market returns.

This article examines at-the-market (ATM) equity programs as an additional source of financial flexibility. We find that firms with higher market-to-book ratios and greater institutional ownership are more likely to announce an ATM program. Firms using ATM programs are also more likely to issue shares when they have exhausted other viable financing alternatives, have timely investment opportunities and when market conditions are favorable. Finally, we document a significant negative announcement effect around the establishment of an ATM program, though the magnitude of this effect is significantly less negative than that of a comparable SEO.

Using a unique setting with significant cross‐market information asymmetries and a large sample of individual commercial property holdings, we provide robust evidence showing that local information plays a significant role in the linkage between local asset concentrations and return outperformance. We further document a significant positive relation between local asset concentration and portfolio returns in markets where information asymmetry is most severe. Two novel identification strategies that exploit a local lender's ability to price the local investor's information advantage and exogenous variation in sales price disclosure laws across states confirm an information‐based effect that is distinct from risk‐based or behavioral explanations.

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