A paper by John "Jack" Corgel, the Robert C. Baker Professor of Real Estate at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, was named the 2011 Edwin S. Mills Best Paper in Real Estate Economics, the premier journal for the real estate industry. The prize was presented at the recent meeting of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

"Can Fund Managers Select Outperforming REITs? Examining Fund Holdings and Trades" was co-authored by Gjergji Cici and Scott Gibson of the Mason School of Business at the College of William and Mary. In the paper abstract, the authors write, "Despite at least six empirical studies published since 2000 designed to assess fund managers' REIT selection ability, their skill remains in question. Unlike previous studies, we examine fund holdings and trades of REITs to answer this question. This approach allows us to explicitly account for portfolio rebalancing that alters REIT-characteristic weights of fund portfolios."

Corgel joined the SHA faculty in 1989, and he served as the first director of the school's Center for Hospitality Research from 1992 to 1994. He recently co-edited The Cornell School of Hotel Administration on Hospitality: Cutting Edge Thinking and Practice (Wiley) with SHA professors Michael Sturman and Rohit Verma. In addition to his work at SHA, Corgel maintains a consulting relationship with PKF Hospitality Research.

About the Center for Real Estate and Finance

Established in 2009, the Center for Real Estate Finance provides a platform for educating students, creating new knowledge through research activities, and exchanging information about real estate with a broad set of audiences. CREF is at the forefront of research in all areas of commercial real estate, from the study of the behavior of real estate assets in investment portfolios to an understanding of real estate capital markets to the science of hedging real estate risk. To learn more about CREF, visit www.cref.cornell.edu.

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Jane Henion
Center for Real and Estate Finance
607.254.8987
Cornell