Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to shed more light on the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the Initial Public Offering (IPO) performance of U.S. Equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) in the short and long run. Design/methodology/approach: I conduct multi-linear regressions on a sample of 89 US REIT IPO for the years 2003 to 2016. I compute the market adjusted excess returns for each of the first 5 days following the IPO to measure short-run IPO performance and the semi-annual cumulative abnormal returns for each of the three years following the IPO to measure ...