DOES REAL ESTATE EDUCATION MATTER FOR S-REIT CEOS?

Abstract

There was extensive research on the topic of CEOs, their attributes and their contribution to firm performances. However, there is currently no research done specifically on the educational background of S-REIT CEOs and the impact on S-REIT performance. This thesis seeks to bridge this gap by explicitly investigating S-REIT CEO’s education background and its impact on firm performance.

The specific objectives of the research are to accomplish the following: (1) Identify CEOs with real Estate background for the period from since the inception of S-REITs till 31 December 2014. The cut off date is selected to coincide with the full financial year prior to which this research was commissioned.

(2) Identify CEOs who have served for a reasonable period of time in their role as the sample group for analysis. This is to ensure that performance measurement of the CEO will not be affected by other short term factors. When tested at 95% confidence interval, there was insufficient reason to reject the null hypothesis, which implies that outperformance of those CEOs with formal REE is not statistically significant compared to CEOs without REE. The findings of this thesis offer some valuable insights to academic researchers and professional investors in S-REIT markets. Firstly, the research on alignment of REE background and the CEO’s ability to drive S-REIT performance has provided some important understanding that at 95% confidence interval, there is no statistical significance that one group outperform the other. Secondly, formal REE, while providing an integral foundation to the CEOs’ competency in running an S-REIT, does not seem to provide the cutting edge in terms of relative performance against selected benchmarks. Lastly, future researchers can draw upon these findings to isolate other possible variables that might be statistically significant, based on a 95% confidence interval.