UK REIT conversion and institutional ownership dynamic

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of conversion to REIT status by former listed property companies in the United Kingdom on the level of institutional ownership during the period of 2007–2016.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses an event study framework to track the change in institutional ownership three years before and after a REIT conversion event. This event study approach circumvents the sample selection bias issue associated with the conversion event wherein the decision to convert to REIT is likely to be endogenous.FindingsPanel regression analysis reveals that changing to REIT status led to a 12.8 and 15.2% increase in institutional ownership and number of institutional investors, respectively. The first order of priority in institutional investors' investment in REIT shares is their preference for liquidity. Further analysis shows that institutional investors changed their preferences towards characteristics associated with systematic risk, firm age and liquidity after the conversion event by becoming less averse to firm-specific risk, placing more emphasis on firm age and less emphasis on systematic risk and liquidity.Practical implicationsOverall, conversion to REIT status helps increase former property companies' investor base, which is in line with the regulator's aim to open up the property market to a wide range of investors through the introduction of a REIT regime. Findings from this paper also have policy implications for countries that are considering a REIT regime for their capital market and existing REIT regimes without a formal conversion mechanism.Originality/valueThis paper offers, for the first time, evidence on 1) how conversion to REITs influences firms' institutional ownership and 2) the determinants of converted REITs' institutional ownership.

Political risks of recovering and discovering meanings in the collective memory of a perverse religious organisation

This article refers to the political risks that a group of five parishioners, members of an aristocratic Catholic parish located in Santiago, Chile, had to face when they recovered and discovered unconscious meanings about the hard and persistent psychological and sexual abuse they suffered in that religious organisation. Recovering and discovering meanings, from the collective memory of that parish, was a sort of conversion event in the five parishioners that determined their decision to bring to the surface of Chilean society the knowledge that the parish, led by the priest Fernando Karadima, functioned as a perverse organisation. That determination implied that the five individuals had to struggle against powerful forces in society, including the dominant Catholic Church in Chile and the political influences from the conservative Catholic elite that attempted to ignore the existence of the abuses that were denounced. The result of this article explains how the five parishioners, through their concerted political actions and courage, forced the Catholic Church to recognise, in an ambivalent way, the abuses committed by Karadima. The theoretical basis of this presentation is based on a socioanalytical approach that mainly considers the understanding of perversion in organisations and their consequences in the control of anxieties.