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We study a stochastic dynamic game of process innovation in which firms can initiate and terminate R&D efforts and production at different times. We discern the impact of knowledge spillovers on the investments in existing markets, as well as on the likely structure of newly forming markets, for all possible asymmetries in production costs between firms. While an increase in spillovers may improve the likelihood of a competitive market, it may at the same time reduce the level to which a technology is developed. We show that the effects of spillovers on investments and surpluses crucially depend on the stage of technology development considered. In particular, we show that high spillovers are not necessarily pro-competitive as they can make it harder for the laggard to catch up with the technology leader.

This paper studies the event history of business foundation. Three theoretical concepts of human, financial and social capital are linked to investigate variations over time of people's decision processes to become self-employed. Data from a cohort of Dutch inhabitants born in 1939/1940 who have been interviewed three times during their lives in 1952, 1983, and 1993 allows for testing theoretical hypotheses that state clear differences between two different roads towards business ownership. Empirical results show that the baseline hazard decreases with time for transgenerational entrepreneurs with self-employed parents, but increases for self-made startups. Social capital in the form of strong ties is a better predictor of enterprise than human capital.

We test whether adverse changes to banks' market valuations during the financial and sovereign debt crises, and the associated increase in banks' cost of funding, affected firms' real decisions. Using new data linking over 3,000 non-financial Italian firms to their bank(s), we find that increases in banks' CDS spreads, and decreases in their equity valuations, resulted in lower investment, employment, and bank debt for younger and smaller firms. These effects dominate those of banks' balance-sheet variables. Moreover, CDS spreads matter more than equity valuations. Finally, higher CDS spreads led to lower aggregate investment and employment, and to a less efficient resource allocation.

This paper shows that asymmetric information about the timing of earnings can affect corporate capital structure. It sheds some new light on two following questions: why may profitable firms be interested in issuing equity, and why does debt not necessarily signal a firm quality. These issues seem to be puzzling from the classical pecking-order theory or signalling theory point of view. The paper also contributes to the analysis of the link between debt-equity choice and subsequent performance after issue (short-term versus long-term) which has been widely discussed in empirical literature but did not get enough attention in theoretical research.

This paper aims to analyze the effects of financial constraints and the financial crisis on the financing and investment policies of newly founded firms. Thereby, the analysis adds important new insights on a crucial segment of the economy. We make use of a large and comprehensive data set of French firms founded in the years 2004-2006, i.e. well before the financial crisis. Our panel data analysis shows that the global financial crisis imposed a shock (mostly demand-driven) on the financing as well as on the investments of these firms. Moreover, we find that financially constrained firms use less external debt financing and invest smaller amounts. They also rely on less trade credit. With regard to bank financing, newly founded firms which are more financially constrained accumulate less bank debt and repay initial bank debt slower than their non-financially constraint counterparts. Finally, we find that financially constrained firms are affected to a smaller degree by the financial crisis than their less financially constrained counterparts.

A structural model is developed and estimated by a maximum likelihood routine to investigate interrelated factor demand subject to nonconvex adjustment costs. The dataset concerns Norwegian plants operating in manufacturing industries and it covers the period 1993-2005. The estimates indicate that it is advantageous to adjust the stock of labour and capital simultaneously. The cost advantage of simultaneous changes is small for capital but is large for labour. The empirical results suggest that when estimating separate factor demand models the bias of parameter estimates is most severe in case of labour demand.

Research on climate change suggests that small improvements in the "sustainability" of buildings can have large effects on greenhouse gas emissions and on energy efficiency in the economy. This paper analyzes the economics of "green" building. First, we analyze a panel of office buildings "certified" by independent rating agencies, finding that large recent increases in the supply of green buildings and the unprecedented volatility in property markets have not significantly affected the relative returns to green buildings. Second, we analyze a large cross section of office buildings, demonstrating that economic premiums in rent and asset values are substantial. Third, we relate the economic premiums for green buildings to their sustainability, confirming that the attributes rated for both thermal efficiency and sustainability contribute to premiums in rents and asset values. Even among green buildings, increased energy efficiency is fully capitalized into rents and asset values.

Little evidence exists on the financing decisions of newly founded firms or on the financing dynamics of these firms over their life cycle. We aim to help filling this gap by investigating the financing dynamics of 2,456 French manufacturing firms founded between 2004 and 2006 through their legally required and reported financial statements. Because we observe significant heterogeneity in the financing decision in the firms' founding year, we focus on analyzing whether these differences widen, persist, or converge by using different convergence concepts. We identify a persistence-cum-convergence pattern. We find the existence of ß-convergence (implying that e.g. firms with lower initial levels of debt accumulate more debt over time) but not of ß-convergence (i.e. we observe an increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of the financing structure). We also show that the dynamics of financing matter for the growth path of the firms.

We derive robust predictions on the effects of uncertainty on short-run investment dynamics in a broad class of models with (partial) irreversibility. When their environments becomes more uncertain, firms become more cautious and less responsive to demand shocks. This result contrasts with the long-run analysis, in which the effect of real options on the level of the capital stock is ambiguous. An investment model is estimated to test these theoretical predications using a panel of UK firms and a stock returns-based measure of uncertainty. As predicted we find that uncertainty reduces firms' responsiveness to demand shocks.

To understand why some firms export while others do not, it is necessary to understand major determinants which lead some firms to engage in exporting. A large base of empirical literature provides evidence that firms which trade are systematically different from those which do not trade in size, productivity, and the involvement of multinational corporations. In this paper, we introduce a financial dimension as an additional source of firm heterogeneity to understand export market participation, and examine how the impact of leverage on firms' exporting decisions varies depending on financial constraints, using a panel of 3,353 Korean manufacturing firms over the period of 1994-2011. First, we find that leverage for financially-constrained firms is negatively associated with the probability of exporting while leverage for financially-unconstrained is not. Also, we find that in the sample of financially-constrained firms, future exporters have higher leverage before they begin to export, while in the sample of financially-unconstrained firms, firms with ex-ante lower leverage self-select to export. Finally, it is found that export market participation decreases leverage for both financially-constrained and financially-unconstrained firms, but the magnitudes of decreases in leverage are larger for financially-constrained firms.

Small and medium hotel companies in the majority of developed tourist countries have dominant role in hotel industry. The same situation is with Serbia. An important precondition for successful business of a hotel is accepting and applying basic pillars of marketing concept i.e. satisfying needs and expectations of guests inorder to achieve profit. Small hotel companies have specific problems in their daily business. Top priority in management and surviving of hotels is cash, because fixed costs are very dominant so hotels earmark more resources for them than for marketing. This means higher engagement and involvement of the state in furtherdevelopment of small and medium hotel companies in Serbia. The state should provide favourable subsidized credit lines for small and medium hotel companies in Serbia, through appropriate support programmes.

"En este documento se propone un modelo de equilibrio general en el que las decisiones de los agentes consumidores y firmas están sujetas a la incertidumbre existente en la tasa de interés, se asume que el comportamiento de ésta puede describirse a través de un movimiento geométrico browniano estándar, o bien, a través de un proceso de Ornstein-Uhlenbeck. El modelo conserva las hipótesis tradicionales acerca del comportamiento optimizador de firmas y consumidores. Como resultado se encuentra que la demanda y la oferta de capital y trabajo reproducen las características de los modelos deterministas; asimismo se definen las trayectorias óptimas de consumo y producción."

The paper determines whether minimum wage stimulates economic growth in Ghana, for the period 1984-2013, using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, within an error correction framework. A preliminary test provides evidence of correlation between minimum wage and investment, thereby allowing for an examination of the wage-growth relationship. Four equations are used to determine the relationship between minimum wage and economic growth. The results from the simple regression of minimum wage on economic growth indicate a positive and statistically significant impact of minimum wage on economic growth both in the long-and short-run. However, the results from other estimations of the wage-growth relationship when investment, credit to the private sector and an interaction term of wage and investment are controlled for precludes any naïve policy formulation which may be solely based on the positive wage-growth relationship obtained. Specifically, the results from the other estimations imply minimum wage can only be growth enhancing if it is met by simultaneous increases in investment spending, as well as deliberate and sustained policies aimed at ensuring credit to finance private investment are readily available, easily accessible, and affordable. In addition, the ratio of public investment to tax revenue must increase as minimum wage increases since such complementary changes are more likely to lead to economic growth.Keywords: minimum wage, investment; economic growth, ARDL, DOLS, ECM.

International audience; In contrast to a large strand of the literature that focuses on multi-product firms, this paper examines multi-destinations firms and the effects of financial constraints on newly served and newly exited destinations. Intuitively, financial constraints have a negative impact on firm expansion in new destinations by limiting firm ability to finance entry costs. The effect on exit from existing destinations is ambiguous. Due to financial constraints, a firm may face difficulties financing the recurrent costs of maintaining her market presence. But if financial constraints also affect entry, the firm may have strong incentives to stay in a given destination since it may not be able to fund the fixed entry costs associated to the reallocation of her portfolio of destinations. We develop a simple theoretical model which includes these two effects. We use a unique longitudinal dataset on French firms that contains information on export destinations of individual firms and allows to construct various firm-level measures of financial constraints to test these predictions. The empirical results suggest that financial constraints hamper a firms’s ability to cover fixed entry costs as well as recurrent costs associated with maintaining the presence in a foreign market, thereby reducing the probability of entering into a new foreign markets and increasing the probability of exiting from an existing foreign market.

This article analyzes the impact of incomplete contracts’ length on investment in a bilateral relationship. The seller has the power to set the contract terms whereas the buyer decides on the investment level, which acts as a cap on future demand. Two-part tariffs succeed at implementing the optimal investment and consumption even if commitment is limited, and the contract’s duration is irrelevant. Interestingly, this efficient solution is rendered possible by subsidies on consumption during the contract. In other terms, duration matters hugely for the contract details (the timing of transfers), not for its performance. Under certain circumstances that we discuss, linear pricing may have to be used, which leads to suboptimal investment. We show that longer contracts are less efficient, meaning that a degree of completeness (pricing width) may be strictly complementary to another one (contract length). The buyer’s surplus increases with respect to the contract duration, whereas the seller loses more in profit than the social surplus decreases. A longer contract actually protects expropriable investors rather than investment itself.

The existence of some 2 billion unused EU Allowances (EUAs) at the end of Phase II of the EU's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has sparked considerable debate about structural shortcomings of the EU ETS. At the same time, there has been a surprising lack of interest in one possible explanation of this accumulation of EUAs: the theory of intertemporal permit trading, i.e. allowance banking. In this paper we adapt basic banking theory to the case of a smoothly declining cap such as that in the EU ETS. We show that it is rational for agents to decrease emissions beyond the constraint imposed by the cap initially, accumulating an allowance bank and then drawing it down in the interest of minimizing abatement cost over time. Having laid out the theory, we carry out a set of simulations for a reasonable range of key parameters, calibrated to the EU ETS, to illustrate the effects of intertemporal optimization of abatement decisions on optimal time paths of emissions and allowance prices. We also explore the effect of an unexpected change in counterfactual emissions. We conclude that bank accumulation as the result of intertemporal abatement cost optimization should be considered at least a partial explanation when evaluating the current discrepancy between the cap and observed emissions in the EU ETS.

We study the transition between non renewable and renewable energy sources with adjustment costs over the production capacity of renewable energy. Assuming constant variable marginal costs for both energy sources, convex adjustment costs and a more expensive renewable energy, we show the following. With sufficiently abundant non renewable energy endowments, the dynamic equilibrium path is composed of a first time phase of only non renewable energy use followed by a transition phase substituting progressively renewable energy to non renewable energy before a last time phase of only renewable energy use. The investment into renewable energy may either begin before actual production of renewable energy or be delayed until the energy price achieves a sufficient gap with respect to the renewable energy cost. With an initially abundant non renewable resource, the features of the transition between non renewable and renewable energy do not depend upon the initial resource stock.

If the relation between investment and economic growth is well established in the macroeconomic literature, the existence of a similar link at the level of the firm has been challenged by empirical work. This paper investigates the channels linking investment and firm performance in the French and Italian manufacturing industries. It does so by putting forth a novel methodology to identify investment spikes that corrects for size dependence. While maintaining the desired properties of a spike measure, our chosen proxy retrieves the expected relation between investment and firm performance. Ex-ante, more efficient and fast growing firms display a higher probability to invest; in turn, after an investment spike has taken place the group of investing firms shows further gains in performance. Finally, expansionary investment episodes, as proxied by the opening of new plants, have a negative effect on profitability while they are associated with higher sales and employment levels.

In U.S. data 1981–2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model in which unsecured firm credit arises from self-enforcing borrowing constraints, preventing an efficient capital allocation among heterogeneous firms. Unsecured credit rests on the value that borrowers attach to a good credit reputation which is a forward-looking variable. We argue that self-fulfilling beliefs over future credit conditions naturally generate endogenously persistent business cycle dynamics. A dynamic complementarity between current and future borrowing limits permits uncorrelated sunspot shocks to unsecured debt to trigger persistent aggregate fluctuations in both secured and unsecured debt, factor productivity and output. We show that these sunspot shocks are quantitatively important, accounting for around half of output volatility. published

This paper explores the role of public debt and fiscal deficits on factor productivity in an economy with credit market frictions and heterogeneous firms. When credit market conditions are sufficiently weak, low interest rates permit the government to run Ponzi schemes so that permanent primary deficits can be sustained. For small enough deficit ratios, the model has two steady states of which one is an unstable bubble and the other one is stable. The stable equilibrium features higher levels of credit and capital, but also a lower interest rate, lower total factor productivity and output. The model is calibrated to the US economy to derive the maximum sustain- able deficit ratio and to examine the dynamic responses to changes in debt policy. A reduction of the primary deficit triggers an expansion of credit and capital, but it also leads to a deterioration of total factor productivity since more low-productivity firms prefer to remain active at the lower equilibrium interest rate.

In recent contributions, von Weizsäcker (2014) and Summers (2014) maintain that mature economies accumulate too much capital. They suggest large and lasting public deficits as a remedy. This study argues that overaccumulation cannot occur in an economy with land. It presents novel data of aggregate land values, analyzes the issue within a stochastic framework and conducts an empirical test of overaccumulation.

International audience; We show that the standard analysis of vertical relationships transposes directly to investment dynamics. Thus, when a firm undertaking a project requires an outside supplier (e.g., an equipment manufacturer) to provide it with a discrete input to serve a growing but uncertain demand, and if the supplier has market power, investment occurs too late from an industry standpoint. The distortion in firm decisions is characterized by a Lerner-type index. Despite the underlying investment option, greater volatility can result in a lower value for both firms. We examine several contractual alternatives to induce efficient timing, a novel vertical restraint being for the upstream to sell a call option on the input. We also extend the model to allow for downstream duopoly. When downstream firms are engaged in a preemption race, the upstream firm sells the input to the first investor at a discount such that the race to preempt exactly offsets the vertical distortion, and this leader invests at the optimal time. These results are illustrated with a case study drawn from the pharmaceutical industry.

In the literature investigating the impact of uncertainty on short-run and long-run investment, most authors have used a log linear profit function. This functional form has been generally considered a reasonable approximation for a more general one and has the advantage of providing closed form solutions for both short-run investment rule and long-run rate of capital accumulation. In this paper, we consider the profit function for the case of a monopolistic firm facing a linear demand function with additive shocks. Under this assumption, analytical solutions, for both short-run investment rule and long-run rate of capital accumulation, are not available. We then 1) propose an analytical approximation of the short-run investment rule and 2) show how such approximation can be used in order to derive the corresponding i) steady-state distribution of the optimal stock of capital and ii) the long-run average rate of capital accumulation. Finally, we compare the long-run rates of capital accumulation calculated under both profit function specifications. We find that, within a plausible range of parameter values, the two rates are significantly different. Hence, we conclude that the choice of a log linear functional form has a non-trivial impact on the magnitude of the long run rate of capital accumulation.

In this paper we attempt to investigate the importance of certain external factors on the investment decision among Polish companies. With the use of data from the tailored made Survey on Receivables we examine factors influencing investment decisions of companies in Poland, assess the relation between the branch and company size and importance of the factors and finally we determine the relative influence of these factors on the actual investment reductions. The results showed that first, although the problem of payment delays is the most important single reason determining the investment decisions of Polish companies, its importance decreases when analyzed simultaneously with other reasons. Second, there are two driving forces determining the investment decisions of Polish companies, namely macroeconomic factors and law-related factors with the relative importance of the former lower than the latter. Third, there is a positive association between the importance attached to factors influencing investment decisions associated with either macroeconomic or legal environment and the investment reductions, meaning that companies facing higher investment reductions are also more prone to notice and value the factors influencing these decisions., JRC.DDG.01-Econometrics and applied statistics

This paper focuses on the effects of financial factors on manufacturing firms' export participation. Using a simple dynamic discrete choice model, we first present the intuition according to which financial constraints reduce the probability of exporting. Then, based on a panel of Egyptian manufacturing firms over the 2003-2008 period, we estimate the impact of financial constraints on export market participation. Our main results show that, unlike financial liquidity, financial constraints reduce the export participation of Egyptian firms. In addition, financial constraints equally have a negative impact on alternative measures of the export activity, namely the export intensity and the time firm take before starting to export

Firm’s strategic orientation involves synchronizing environmental dynamics, corporate strategy and capital structure in order to achieve firm performance targets. The co-alignment model used successfully in the hospitality industry might be used in a wider context as a framework in explaining these relationships simultaneously. Using the data of public firms in Indonesia during the period of 1996-2010, we found that co-alignment model can be implemented in property and real estate industry as well as in hospitality industry.

AD; International audience; Work significantly affects human life and health. Overworking may decrease the quality of life and cause direct economic losses. Technological innovations encourage modernization of firms' capital and improve labor productivity in the workplace. The paper investigates the optimal individual choice of work intensity under improving technology embodied in new equipment leading to shorter lifetime of capital goods (obsolescence). The balanced growth trajectories are analyzed in this context to find out, in particular, how the optimal choice of work intensity is tied to the rate of embodied technological change. The impact of embodied technological advances on the work/life balance problem is discussed and their macroeconomic consequences are highlighted.

We present a duopoly model of strategic capital accumulation in continuous time with uncertainty, such that investment takes the form of singular control. Spot competition is of Cournot type. For this model there exists a parameterized and Pareto-rankable family of Markov perfect equiblibria in symmetric strategies, according to which implicit collusion induces positive option values. However, preemption can also eliminate any option value in a limiting case corresponding to Bertrand prices.

In many cases consumers cannot observe firms' investment in quality or safety, but have only beliefs on the average quality of the industry. In addition, the outcome of the collective investment game of the firms may be stochastic since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external factors that may affect production. In such situations, when only consumers' subjective perceptions of the industry level of quality matters, the regulator may make information available to firms or subsidize their information acquisition. Under what conditions is it desirable to make information available? We show how firms' overall level of investment in quality depends upon the parameters of the quality accumulation process, the cost of investment and the number of firms in the industry. We also show the potentially negative effects on the total level of quality from providing information on consumers' actual valuation., Dans plusieurs situations les consommateurs ne peuvent pas observer les investissements des firmes pour la qualité et la sécurité des produits. Les firmes, pour leur part, ne peuvent pas parfaitement contrôler le processus de production et la réalisation de la qualité finale est incertaine. Nous analysons un jeu dynamique de firmes qui peuvent investir dans la qualité sous deux conditions : la qualité réalisée est stochastique et les consommateurs ont des perspectives subjectives de la qualité moyenne. Nous déduisons les conditions d'investissement et la valeur de la firme qui en résultent et nous déterminons les conditions sous lesquelles une firme chercherait à obtenir des informations exactes sur la perception des consommateurs. Ensuite, nous nous demandons si une agence extérieure devrait fournir ces informations aux firmes. Sous les hypothèses sur l'évolution stochastique de la qualité agrégée ainsi que sur la distribution non-biaisée des perceptions des consommateurs, la réponse est négative ; même à coût nul, cette information ne devrait pas être fournie aux firmes afin de maximiser la qualité.

The spatial concentration of firms has long been a central issue in economics both under the theoretical and the applied point of view due mainly to the important policy implications. A popular approach to its measurement, which does not suffer from the problem of the arbitrariness of the regional boundaries, makes use of micro data and looks at the firms as if they were dimensionless points distributed in the economic space. However in practical circumstances the points (firms) observed in the economic space are far from being dimensionless and are conversely characterized by different dimension in terms of the number of employees, the product, the capital and so on. In the literature, the works that originally introduce such an approach (e.g. Arbia and Espa, 1996; Marcon and Puech, 2003) disregard the aspect of the different firm dimension and ignore the fact that a high degree of spatial concentration may result from both the case of many small points clustering in definite portions of space and from only few large points clustering together (e.g. few large firms). We refer to this phenomena as to clustering of firms and clustering of economic activities. The present paper aims at tackling this problem by adapting the popular Kfunction (Ripley, 1977) to account for the point dimension using the framework of marked point process theory (Penttinen, 2006)

Are financial constraints preventing firms from importing capital goods? Sourcing capital goods from foreign countries is costly and requires internal or external financial resources. A simple model of foreign technology adoption shows that credit constraints act as a barrier to importing capital goods under imperfect financial markets. In our study, we investigate this prediction using detailed balance-sheet data from Indian manufacturing firms having reported information on financial statements and imports by type of good over the period 1997-2006. Our empirical findings shed new light on the micro determinants of firms' choices to import capital goods. Baseline estimation results show that firms with a lower leverage and higher liquidity are more likely to source their capital goods from foreign countries. Quantitatively, a 10 percentage point improvement of the leverage or liquidity ratio increases the probability of importing capital goods by 11 percent to 13 percent respectively. Different robustness tests demonstrate that these results are not driven by omitted variable bias related to changes in firm observable characteristics as well as ownership status. These findings are also robust to alternative specifications dealing with the potential reverse causality issues. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.

The consumption tax affects the consumer, but also affects the wealth of the producer because of the tax incidence effect. It affects cash flows from corporate investment, bears influence on capital budgeting choices on investment timing and financing and the respective agency conflicts between shareholders and creditors. In the context of irreversible investment, our model shows that consumption taxation delays investment and precipitates default. Furthermore, we find that the consumption tax has a negative effect on the agency costs of debt, the yield spreads and the optimal leverage ratio. Finally, the model also produces implications for governmental tax policy., peer-reviewed

This paper aims to present factoring as an alternative funding model. This paper also tries to scientifically explore and emphasize its economic role thorough advantages and disadvantages of such financing model, and show condition in world and Croatia. Good corporate governance and professional financial management can contribute to the establishment of such business strategy (in terms of: strategy in relation to potential risks, the systems for managing risks and monitoring, investment strategies, interventions, etc.) that will make the company resistant to unexpected and unpredictable changes in both their environment and the global marketplace and timely actions to contribute to faster recover from the effects of the crisis and business damages reduced to a minimum recovery.

Institutional concentration of financial aggregates as well their market allocation through stock exchange is one of the basic conditions for efficient and fast economic growth. Full implementation of above mentioned functions also means appropriate place for investment banking, and their activities on primary capital market. This can be opportunity for larger investments in national economy and tourism.

When an agent invests in new industrial activities, he has a limited initial knowledge of his project's returns. Acquiring information allows him both to reduce the uncertainty on the dangerousness of this project and to limit potential damages that it might cause on people's health and on the environment. In this paper, we study whether there exist situations in which the agent does not acquire information. We find that an agent with time-consistent preferences, as well as an agent with hyperbolic ones, will acquire information unless its cost exceeds the direct benefit they could get with this information. Nevertheless, a hyperbolic agent may remain strategically ignorant and, when he does acquire information, he will acquire less information than a time-consistent type. Moreover, a hyperbolic-discounting type who behaves as a time-consistent agent in the future is more inclined to stay ignorant. We then emphasize that this strategic ignorance depends on the degree of precision of the information. Finally, we analyse the role that existing liability rules could play as an incentive to acquire information under uncertainty and with regard to the form of the agent's preferences.

TEN-T is intended to provide the single market with integrated modern transport networks, but infrastructure investment per se has other important effects. Besides reviewing the different reasons that justify public investment in infrastructure capital, the paper focuses the existing obstacles to a full implementation of TEN-T and, in particular, the funding gap, which has always been the most evident obstacle of them. Prospects and possible remedies are also briefly considered., peer-reviewed

JEL classification: D81; D92; O12; Q12; C23; The article investigates the investment and financial constraints for French, Hungarian and Slovenian farms using FADN panel data with different econometric estimation approaches. Farm gross investment is positively associated with real sales growth and cash flow implying the absence of soft budget constraint. Gross farm investment is positively associated with Investment subsidies. Specific results by country are found depending on farm indebtedness. Investment subsidies can mitigate some capital market imperfections in short-term, while on long-term what is crucial is farm sale ability to successfully compete in the output market gaining sufficient cash flow for farm competitive survival and investment.

Cahier de Recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 865/2007; The investment procedure prescribes the stages and tests through which all investment projects must pass before being accepted or not. It governs the conditions of acceptability and constitutes a powerful device of a priori control. In this paper, we intend to understand how investment procedures enable grand ideals regarding investment to be institutionalised. In particular, over and above the assumed effectiveness and rationale of these procedures, we identify the mechanisms through which these procedures construct social roles. In this respect, this research goes beyond the procedures' technical functions and focuses on the very form of procedures. Indeed, the form of a procedure presents two features: it is written, generally consigned to a "manual"; and it relies on "cognitive artefacts" (Norman, 1991) or "technologies of the intellect" (Goody, 1977) such as lists, tables and formulae like Discounted Cash Flow. This paper shows how this specific form takes effect during the process of institutionalisation, through which grand investment ideals (e.g. competitiveness, value creation) are transformed into concrete devices and into roles (Miller, 1991). Thanks to an enquiry conducted in 2003 and 2004, investment procedures in six large companies in a French context are analysed. It is argued that (1) the formalisation of the objectives of the procedures, as well as the definitions of investment through typologies shape the actors' boundaries of action; (2) valuation methods based on the domination of economic-mathematical formula favour short-term over long-term reflection; (3) the setting of decision-making thresholds formalise individuals' tasks and responsibilities. Therefore, the very form of procedures shape each phase of the institutionalisation process as defined by Hasselbladh and Kallinikos (2000) and contribute to creates a singular world - that of investment decisions.

We show that the standard analysis of vertical relationships transposes directly to investment timing. Thus, when a firm undertaking a project requires an outside supplier (e.g. an equipment manufacturer) to provide it with a discrete input, and if the supplier has market power, investment occurs too late from an industry standpoint. The distortion in firm decisions is characterized by a Lerner index, which is related to the parameters of a stochastic downstream demand. When feasible, vertical restraints restore efficiency. For instance, the upstream firm can induce entry at the correct investment threshold by selling a call option on the input. Otherwise, competition may substitute for vertical restraints. In particular, if two firms are engaged in a preemption race downstream, the upstream firm sells the input to the first investor at a discount that is chosen in such a way that the race to preempt exactly offsets the vertical externality, and this leader invests at the optimal market threshold.

In a real option model, we show that the standard analysis of vertical relationships transposes directly to investment timing. Thus, when a firm undertaking a project requires an outside supplier (e.g., an equipment manufacturer) to provide it with a discrete input to serve a growing but incertain demand, and if the supplier has market power, investment occurs too late from an industry standpoint. The distortion in firm decisions is characterized by a lerner-type index, and we show how market growth rate and volatility affect the extent of the distortion. If the initial market demand is high, greater volatility increases the effective investment cost and results in lower value for both firms. Vertical restraints can restore efficiency. For instance, the upstream firm can induce entry at the correct investment threshold by selling a call option on the input. Otherwise, if two downstream firms are engaged in a preemption race, the upstream firm sells the input to the first investor at a discount which is chosen in such a way that the race to preempt exactly offsets the vertical distortion, and this leader invests at the optimal time.

The paper analyzes the link between financial constraints and firm export behavior. Our main finding is that firms enjoying better financial health are more likely to become exporters. The result contrasts with the previous empirical literature which found evidence that export participation improves firm financial health, but not that export starters display any ex-ante financial advantage. On the contrary, we find that financial constraints act as a barrier to export participation. Better access to external financial resources increases the probability to start exporting and also shortens the time before firms decide to serve foreign customers. This finding has important policy implications as it suggests that, in presence of financial markets imperfections, public intervention can be called for to help efficient but financially constrained firms to overcome the sunk entry costs into export markets and expand their activities abroad.

In this paper we present a dynamic model of a firm which is deciding whether to outsource parts of its production to a less developed economy where wages and the level of technology are lower. Outsourcing reduces production costs but is associated with spillovers to foreign potential competitors. Spillovers over time increase productivity of firms in the foreign country and make them stronger competitors on the common market. The paper analyzes the inter-temporally optimal behavior of the firm and shows that two outcomes are possible in the long-run. One outcome is that there is one steady state where the firm invests a positive amount in the foreign country and the other outcome is a continuum of steady states with no investment. The paper then derives conditions such that it is optimal for the firm to invest in the foreign country and characterizes different types of optimal dynamic investment patterns. In addition, using numerical dynamic optimization methods, the effect of the speed of technology adoption and of the wage differential on total labor income in the home country is studied taking into account the transition dynamics. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

International audience; This paper studies how the assignment of patents as collateral determines the savings of firms and magnifies the effect of innovative rents on investment in research and development (R&D). We analyse the behaviour of innovative firms that face random and lumpy investment opportunities in R&D. High growth rates of innovations, possibly higher than the real rate of interest, may be achieved despite financial constraints. There is an optimal level of publicly funded policy by the patent and trademark office that minimizes the legal uncertainty surrounding patents as collateral and maximizes the growth rate of innovations.

In the strategic investment under uncertainty literature the trade off between the value of waiting known from single decision maker models and the incentive to preempt competitors is mainly studied in duopoly models.This paper aims at studying competitive investments in new markets where more than two (potential) competitors are present.In case of three firms an accordion effect in terms of investment thresholds is detected in the sense that an exogenous demand shock results in a change of the wedge between the investment thresholds of the first and second investors that is qualitatively different from the change of the wedge between the second and third investment threshold.This result extends to the n firm case.We show that a direct implication of the accordion effect is that there are two types of equilibria in the three firm case.In the first type all firms invest sequentially and in the second type the first two investors invest simultaneously and the third investor invests at a later moment.If we consider sequential equilibria and compare entry times of the first investors for different potential market sizes, it turns out that in the two firm case the first investor invests earlier than in the monopoly case, in the three firm case the investment timing lies in between the one and the two firm case, the four firm case lies in between the two and the three firm case, and so on and so forth.Hence, a policy maker interested in an early start up should hope for an even number of competitors, although for n large the investment times of the first investors are almost equal.

This paper presents an empirical examination of firm characteristic determinants of the capital structure of a sample of 299 Irish small and medium sized firms (SMEs). Hypotheses formulated from pecking order and agency theories incorporating a financial growth life cycle approach are tested on a number of multivariate regression models. Results suggest that age, size, level of intangible activity, ownership structure and the provision of collateral are important determinants of the capital structure in SMEs. A generalization of Zellner's (1962) Seemingly Unrelated Regression approach (SUR) is used to examine industry effects and to test the stability of parameter estimates across sectors. Results suggest that the influence of age, size, ownership structure and provision of collateral is similar across industry sectors, indicating the universal effect of information asymmetries. Firms overcome the lack of adequate collateralizable firm assets in two ways; by providing personal assets as collateral for business debt, and by employing additional external equity to finance research and development projects.

This paper studies the innovation dynamics of an oligopolistic in- dustry. The firms compete not only in the output market but also by engaging in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. Rent sharing may generate productivity dependent wage differentials. Productivity growth creates intertemporal spill–over effects, which af- fect the incentives for innovation at subsequent dates. Over time the industry equilibrium approaches a steady state. The paper character- izes the evolution of the industry’s innovation behavior and its market structure on the adjustment path.

People care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides evidence on how the relative income position affects professional sports performances. Our analysis suggests that if a player�s salary is below the average and this difference increases, his performance worsens. Moreover, the larger the income differences, the stronger positional concern effects are observable. We also find that the more the players are integrated, the more evident a relative income effect is. Finally, we find that positional effects are stronger among high performing teams.

This paper revisits the important result of the real options approach to investment under uncertainty, which states that increased uncertainty raises the value of waiting and thus decelerates investment. Typically in this literature projects are assumed to be perpetual. However, in today's economy firms face a fast-changing technology environment, implying that investment projects are usually considered to have a finite life. The present paper studies investment projects with finite project life, and we find that, in contrast with the existing theory, investments may be accelerated by increased uncertainty. It is shown that this particularly happens at low levels of uncertainty and when project life is short.

In this paper we aim at identifying stylized facts in order to suggest adequate models of spatial co–agglomeration of industries. We describe a class of spatial statistical methods to be used in the empirical analysis of spatial clusters. Compared to previous contributions using point pattern methods, the main innovation of the present paper is to consider clustering for bivariate (rather than univariate) distributions, which allows uncovering co–agglomeration and repulsion phenomena between the different industrial sectors. Furthermore we present the results of an empirical application of such methods to a set of European Patent Office (EPO) data and we produce a series of empirical evidences referred to the the pair–wise intra–sectoral spatial distribution of patents in Italy in the nineties. In this analysis we are able to identify some distinctive joint patterns of location between patents of different sectors and to propose some possible economic interpretations.

Cahier de recherche du Groupe HEC Paris, n° 907; This paper investigates why firms choose to undertake product expansion through alliances with competitors rather than on their own. We argue that both firm and product heterogeneity influence this expansion mode choice. Building on and expanding Penrose's theory of firm growth, we propose that resource conditions influence not only the decision to grow but also the choice of expansion mode: firms turn to horizontal alliances in order to implement product expansion projects that require greater resources than those available to them. More precisely, we hypothesize that a firm is more likely to launch a new product in a given business domain through a horizontal alliance rather than autonomously, when the resource requirements of the project are greater, when the resources available to the firm are more limited, when there is a mismatch between resource endowment and requirement, and when the firm's collaborative competence allows it to better cope with the inter-organizational concerns that collaboration with competitors raises. We find support for our arguments on a sample of 310 new aircraft developments launched between 1945 and 2000, either by a single prime contractor or as a horizontal alliance in which prime contractorship is shared with another industry incumbent. This paper highlights the importance of developing an integrated perspective which combines production and exchange aspects of governance decisions.