ABSTRACT

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US reviews REIT financial statements at least every three years. In these reviews, it adopts the perspective of an investor in evaluating the disclosure of REITs and asks questions an investor would ask. If any disclosure deficiencies are identified, the SEC sends a comment letter to the REIT requesting clarification, more discussion or corrections/improvements in future filings. We investigate the response of REIT investors to the public release of comment letter correspondences between the SEC and publicly traded equity REITs as well as the impact of different types of SEC comments on this response. Using a sample of 395 comment letter correspondences for annual reports (10-Ks) over the period of 2006 to 2019, we find a negative stock market response. Business-related SEC comments are most important in explaining the market response, but only for less transparent REITs. Our results suggest that SEC comment letters may improve the information environment for certain types of REITs by providing new information relevant to forecasting future cash flows and/or signalling information about a REIT’s reporting quality.

摘要

美国证券交易委员会 (SEC) 至少每三年审查一次 REIT 财务报表。在这些审查中，它采用投资者的角度来评估 REITs 的披露并提出投资者会提出的问题。如果发现任何披露缺陷，SEC 会向 REIT 发送评论信，要求在未来的文件中进行澄清、更多讨论或更正/改进。我们调查了 REIT 投资者对 SEC 与公开交易的股权 REIT 之间公开发布的评论信函件的回应，以及不同类型的 SEC 评论对此回应的影响。使用 2006 年至 2019 年期间年度报告 (10-Ks) 的 395 封评论信函样本，我们发现了负面的股市反应。与商业相关的 SEC 评论对于解释市场反应最重要，但仅适用于透明度较低的 REIT。我们的结果表明，美国证券交易委员会的评论信可能会通过提供与预测未来现金流量相关的新信息和/或有关 REIT 报告质量的信号信息来改善某些类型 REITs 的信息环境。