Corporate Real Estate, Capital Structure and Stock Performance: Evidence from China

This paper attempts to study the relationships among corporate real estate (CRE), capital structure and stock performance of China's non-real estate firms, including the bidirectional relationships between debt ratio (DR) and corporate real estate ratio (CRER), the impact of CRER on stock performance, and whether this impact differs across firms with different debt levels. The results show that for the overall sample, DR has a positive effect on CRER, while CRER negatively affects DR. CRER has no significant positive impact on the abnormal returns of stocks, and even decreases those for firms in the information industry. However, it can significantly reduce the systematic risks of stock returns. Moreover, we find that CRER has no significant effect on abnormal returns regardless of the amount of debt level that a firm has, and there is no significant difference between the effects of CRER on abnormal returns for firms with different levels of debt. On the other hand, the effect of CRER on systematic risk is significantly negative for firms in the low debt group, and insignificantly positive for firms in the high debt group. The CRER of lower debt firms can significantly reduce much more systematic risk than that of the high debt firms.