This study examines the effects of stock liquidity on firm value and corporate governance using the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) setting. The unique features of the REIT industry, including homogeneity of the investment structures, the high payout requirement, and the importance of institutional investors, highlight the positive effect of stock liquidity on firm value through corporate governance. To address the endogeneity problem, we perform a difference-indifferences test based on the propensity score matching estimator. The result shows that REIT stock liquidity has a causal and positive effect on firm value, as measured by Tobin's Q.Importantly, REIT stock liquidity is conducive to better corporate governance through the channel of institutional ownership. REIT stock liquidity leads to higher institutional ownership, particularly for institutional investor types that are active monitors and institutional investors with multi-firm ownership in their REIT portfolios.

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This study examines whether property transaction affects the price discovery process in real estate markets. Prior literature shows that price discovery generally first takes place in the securitized public real estate investment trust (REIT) market. We conjecture that property transaction provides novel information to the direct real estate market and can change the dynamics between public and private real estate returns. We employ a unique dataset of property transactions to construct "transaction windows¨ and specifically examine the causality between public and private real estate markets around these periods. We form firm-level pairs of public and private price series, and estimate the normalized common factor loadings per Gonzalo and Granger (1995) by using a vector error-correction model. Our findings show that a significant proportion of price discovery happens in the private market instead of the public REIT market. Our results are robust to investments of different property types and different lengths of transaction windows. Overall, the findings in this study imply that property acquisition and disposition provide crucial information to the private real estate market and induce a reverse causality between the public and private markets.