New Paper - Conglomerate Discount and Short Sales

An outstanding puzzle in Finance is why conglomerates are traded at a discount relative to focused firms. While some academics say that the discount doesn't even exist, we (hopefully!) bring a new angle to this discussion.

We show that conglomerates have less dispersion of opinions than focused firms and face relatively fewer short sales constraints. These two effects partially explains why we observe a discount, being due to trading frictions.

The first version of a paper (together with Adam Reed and Ed van Wesep) is on SSRN:
 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2636770

Any comments will be appreciated! 

Greece and Reality

So Greece accepted all conditions from the creditors. Is that a surprise to anyone other than the dreamers from the left that think money grows in trees? The EU made many mistakes and could have avoided lots of pain to everyone involved, but dealing with deluded politicians on the Greek side caused even greater harm. while is totally democratic that Greek citizens might not want the deal they offer,citizens from other countries can also democratically chose not to throw away money to a country that doesn't want to implement the painful reformss that are needed. As usual in life, there is no free lunch.

US Housing Market Value

I read this post with an interesting animated gif looking at US residential property values within each county in the US. Note how most of the value is concentrated in California and the Northeast. From what I read, this is an example of a cartogram. Cool.

It starts with a standard map where yellow means relatively cheap residential area, while the more red, the higher the value.

This is the static picture (with labels):