Abstract
In this paper, we study the global real estate investment trust market in terms of behavior finance. We take the US, Euro area, Japan and Australia this four regions as our research fields. We use two methods to construct the investor sentiment. One is to recollect the consumer confidence index (CCI) in terms of 12 months, and use the principal components analysis to isolate the common component to form one candidate of the sentiment indexes. The other is to use the first difference of the consumer confidence index (CCI), and then construct investor sentiment indexes for four major REIT markets by using the principal components analysis and decompose them into one global and four local indexes. We like to analyze which of the two candidates would be a better proxy of investor sentiment and how they affect REIT index returns. We also want to analyze whether the worldwide investor sentiment index and the investor sentiment of individual countries have influences on REIT index returns. We conclude that when investors are optimistic, REIT returns become higher.