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faculty Research
People don’t leave bad companies. They leave bad managers.
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oes a hotel owned by a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) perform better than a non-REIT hotel? Does REIT ownership add value at an individual property level? Limited prior research on the topic has been inconclusive. In collaboration with fellow VSB professors Shelly Howton, Shawn Howton, and Johnny Lee, Assistant Professor of Finance Mi (Meg) Luo re-examined these questions and arrived at an affirmative response. Other research that has investigated the impact of REIT ownership on property performance focused on revenue-based performance measures. Luo and her co-authors, however, approached this issue using a unique dataset of detailed accounting information for individual hotels across five states. Their expansive dataset differed in that it enabled them to examine both top-line and bottomline performance of hotel operations. The team of professors used this evidence to conclude that REIT ownership favorably impacts property performance and that REIT-owned hotels have higher profit margins.
villanova business | summer 2012
The team of professors used this evidence to conclude that REIT ownership favorably impacts property performance and that REIT-owned hotels have higher profit margins. Luo’s research has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Corporate Finance, and the Journal of Internet Commerce. She earned her PhD in finance from the University of Utah and a BS in finance at Nanjing University in China. Her research interests include executive compensation, cash management, and dividend policy. In 2008, she received the Villanova Summer Research Grant.
ILLUSTRATIONS: DAN PAGE
Measuring the REIT Stuff
air treatment in the workplace is something employees value and managers strive to provide. However, the perception of fairness may differ between employees and managers, and this variance can have negative repercussions on employee morale, effectiveness, and retention. VSB Professor of Management Quinetta Roberson, PhD, an academic expert on diversity in Fortune 500 companies, examines the topic of fairness perceptions in the workplace in her paper, “Justice as a Dynamic Construct,” which recently was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. To gather data for this paper, Roberson surveyed 523 working adults four times over the course of a year about their perception of fairness in the workplace. This research led Roberson and her co-authors to discover a flaw in typical corporate management: although most supervisors like to think they are good managers, many of them fail to understand what their employees really want or know how to address their concerns about being treated unfairly. Roberson’s research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Academy of Management Review, and Organizational Research Methods. In 2007, Group & Organization Management awarded her the Best Paper Award. Roberson has served on the editorial boards of various journals and currently is associate editor of the Journal of Applied Psychology.
