tailieunhanh - STOCK PRICES AND FUNDAMENTALS

The extent of foreign ownership has shown a significant rise since the publication of our previous findings in 2006 when overseas ownership of the City’s office stock was estimated at 45%. The further increase to 52% represents the culmination of a consistently rising trend which has seen foreign ownership track 60% for the past eight years. In 1980 overseas ownership of the City’s property assets stood at a mere 8% (including owner-occupiers). Foreign ownership passed 25% in the mid 1990s and, fuelled by the growth of global real asset investment and the expansion of private real estate fund vehicles, exceeded. | Stock Prices and Fundamentals John Heaton and Deborah Lucas June 1999 The paper has benefited from the comments of John Campbell Annette Vissing-Jprgensen and participants of the 1999 Macroeconomics Annual Conference. We thank the National Science Foundation for financial support. f Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management and the NBER 1 Introduction While stock returns in the . this past century have exceeded Treasury returns by an average of about 6 percent annually returns in the last few years have exceeded the return on Treasury bills by more than 12 percent annually. Commentators have suggested a variety of explanations for the dramatic stock market run-up that accompanied these high returns. The baby boom is entering peak savings years productivity has escalated worldwide due to technological improvements and political change and stock market participation rates are on the rise. The growth of mutual funds has lowered transactions costs and made diversification feasible. Public awareness of the benefits of stock market investing is high. On the other hand irrational exuberance could be fueling the price rise with inexperienced investors expecting double-digit returns to continue indefinitely or at least long enough to reap a substantial gain. Whether the price rise is due primarily to fundamentals or whether it is the result of a bubble is important to policy makers concerned with avoiding the real disruption a sharp stock market decline could precipitate. It is also important to the academic debate over the determinants of stock valuations. Because this paper is about the relation between stock prices and fundamentals we emphasize three broad categories of explanations for the recent price rise changes in corporate earnings growth changes in consumer preferences and changes in stock market participation patterns. The goal in quantifying the potential impact of fundamental effects is to better understand whether a combination of .