Contact:
Christopher Stolarski
(414) 288-1988
christopher.stolarski@marquette.edu
Pennington-Cross, Cashman honored by American Real Estate Association
MILWAUKEE – Two professors in the College of Business Administration at Marquette University were recently honored with top manuscript prizes at the American Real Estate Association’s national conference. Dr. Anthony Pennington-Cross, professor and chair of finance, and Dr. George Cashman, associate professor of finance, were awarded best papers in Retail Real Estate and Real Estate Market Analysis, respectively.
The ARES is an association of real estate thought leaders with members drawn from academia and the profession at large, both in the United States and internationally.
In his paper, Entry and Co-Location: Evidence from Chilean Retailers, Pennington-Cross examined how and why food retailers decide to enter Chilean markets and what impact their entry into a particular market has on existing retailers. In short, Pennington-Cross and his collaborator and former student, Sergio Garate, found marked differences between the way Chilean and U.S. retailers enter a market.
“Contrary to evidence in the U.S., where big box retailers co-locate much more than economic opportunities would indicate makes sense, we find evidence that Chilean retailer entry decisions are based primarily on local and national economic conditions,” Pennington-Cross said. “Further, the existence of incumbent stores repel entry. This may be due to the weaker regulatory and zoning restrictions in Chile or other unobserved differences between the U.S. and Chile.”
Cashman, with collaborators David Harrison of the University of Central Florida and Hainan Sheng of Texas Tech University, looked at the impact physical and cultural distance has on a firm’s liquidity and other key financial metrics. In their paper, Know Thy Neighbor: The Impact of Cultural and Geographic Distance on Information Asymmetry, they studied companies across the Asia-Pacific region and found that a greater physical and/or cultural distance between a firm’s investments and its headquarters resulted in less liquidity and other negative measures.
“Our results suggest that increasing the distance between a firm’s headquarters location and the revenue producing assets they own and/or operate imposes information barriers that make the firm harder to value,” Cashman said. “In short, ‘locals’ possess an informational advantage compared to more distant investors, and culture is incredibly important to the marketplace and difficulties arise when firms attempt to span multiple cultures.”
For copies of the manuscripts, please contact Christopher Stolarski, senior communication strategist, at christopher.stolarski@marquette.edu.
