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First version: 28th May, 2014, This version: 28th August, 2014, This paper aims to extend the existing evidence on the investment value of green buildings to international markets, specifically the residential market in Japan. Using a unique transaction database of condominiums in the Tokyo metropolitan area and a hedonic analytical framework, we find that green buildings command a small but significant premium on both the asking and transaction prices. This finding is consistent with results from other countries. As far as we are aware, this is also the first study of green buildings’ economic value based on a hedonic model incorporating buyer characteristics. However, further analysis reveals that this premium is primarily driven by wealthy households that exhibit a higher willingness-to-pay for eco-labelled condominiums, both as a total amount and as a fraction of the total sales price. We therefore conclude that eco-labels are perceived as a luxury good in the Japanese housing market rather than a way to save money on lower utility bills., 基盤研究(S) = Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S)

Empirical estimations of the New Keynesian Phillips curve support hybrid versions with a positive weight on lagged inflation and a weight less than one on expected inflation. We argue that myopic price setting of some agents explains the low weight on expected inflation. The lagged term can be explained by trend extrapolation if information about the future is costly. In a laboratory experiment we implement the Calvo (1983) microfoundations of the Phillips curve. Our hypotheses are supported by the experimental data. About half of the subjects set optimal Calvo prices while about a third is myopic.

In this paper we consider the entry and exit of firms in a Ramsey model with capital and an endogenous labour supply. At the firm level, there is a fixed cost combined with increasing marginal cost, which gives a standard U-shaped cost curve with optimal firm size. The costs of entry (exit) are quadratic in the flow of new firms. The number of firms becomes a second state variable and the entry dynamics gives rise to a richer set of dynamics than in the standard case: in particular, there is likely to be a hump shaped response of output to a fiscal shock with maximum impact after impact and before steady-state is reached. Output and capital per firm are also likely to be hump shaped.

Natural gas plays an important role in the future development of electricity markets, as it is the least emission-intensive fossil generation option and additionally provides the needed plant operating flexibility to deal with intermittent renewable generation. As both the electricity and the natural gas market rely on networks, congestion in one market may lead to changes in the other. In addition, investment in one market impacts investment in the other market to the extent that these investments may even become substitutes for each another. The objective of this paper is to develop a dynamic model representation of coupled natural gas and electricity network markets to test the potential interaction with respect to investments. The model is tested under simplified conditions as well as for a stylized European network setting. The results indicate that there is sufficient potential for investment substitution and market interactions that warrant the application of coupled models, especially with regard to simulations of long-term system developments.

The paper studies the incentive for providers to invest in new health care technologies under alternative payment systems, when the patients' benefits are uncertain. If the reimbursement by the purchaser includes both a variable (per patient) and a lump-sum component, efficiency can be ensured both in the timing of adoption (dynamic) and the intensity of use of the technology (static). If the second instrument is unavailable, a trade-off may emerge between static and dynamic efficiency. In this context, we also discuss how the regulator could use control of the level of uncertainty faced by the provider as an instrument to mitigate the trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency. Finally, we calibrate the model to study a specific technology and estimate the cost of a regulatory failure.

We solve an agent's optimization problem of meeting demands for cash over time with cash deposited in bank or invested in stock. The stock pays dividends and uncertain capital gains, and a commission is incurred in buying and selling of stock. We use a stochastic maximum principle to obtain explicitly the optimal transaction policy.

The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The analytic strategy of this paper relies upon the stochastic real options modelling approach. In a nutshell, our simulations using numerical methods indicate that comprehensive product market reforms would increase factor demand and growth significantly in the medium and long run.

We develop a dynamic model of intermediate goods trade in which the pattern and the extent of intermediate goods trade are endogenous. We consider a small open economy whose final good production employs an endogenous array of intermediate goods, from low technology (high cost) to high technology (low cost). The underlying intermediate goods technology evolves over time. We allow for endogenous markups and consider the effect of trade policy on both the intensive and extensive margins. We show that either domestic or foreign trade liberalization reduces the range of exports and the range of domestic intermediate goods production. Either type of trade liberalization reduces intermediate producer markups and increases fi nal good output and average productivity, with stronger positive productivity effects for newly imported intermediate inputs. However, domestic trade liberalization results in lower aggregate and average technology for domestic intermediate good producers.

Employing a continuous-time real options modeling framework, this paper scrutinizes the incentives to invest in German offshore wind farms. The focus of the analysis is the mode of action of the German feed-in tariff system for offshore wind energy deployment. The numerical results reveal that the long term subsidies in Germany set prices that provide higher returns than needed to secure investment, even when taking the uncertainties involved into account. The results obtained can be used by policy-makers to design comprehensive and efficient offshore wind energy support measures.

In most industries, ranging from information systems development to construction, an overwhelming proportion of projects are delayed beyond estimated completion time. This fact constitutes somewhat of a puzzle for existing theory. The present paper studies project delays and optimal contracts under moral hazard in a setting with time to build. Within this setup, project delays are found to be most likely to happen at early stages of development, and intimately connected to the degree of commitment of the procurer and the class of contracts that can be enforced. The first-best, optimal spot contracting and optimal long-term contract scenarios are analyzed, as well as commonly encountered additional constraints on the long-term contract.

We describe the evolution of productivity growth in a competitive industry with free entry and exit. The exogenous wage rate determines the firms’ engagement in labor productivity enhancing process innovation. There is a unique steady state of the industry dynamics, which is globally asymptotically stable. In the steady state, the number of active firms, their unit labor cost and supply depend on the growth rate but not on the level of the wage rate. In addition to providing comparative statics of the steady state, the paper characterizes the industry's adjustment path.

What determines firm growth over the life-cycle? Exploiting unique firm panel data on internal organization, balance sheets and innovation, representative of the entire Canadian economy, we study recent theories that examine life-cycle patterns for firm growth. These theories include organizational capital accumulation and management practices, financial frictions, learning about demand, and recent endogenous growth models with incumbent innovation. We emphasize the importance of differentiating between pure age effects of these theories and effects on size conditional on age. Our stylized facts highlight both empirical successes and shortcomings of current theory. First, models of organizational capital and innovation are broadly consistent with firm size correlations conditional on age but have difficulties matching the life-cycle dynamics of firm organization and innovation. Second, among theories we analyze, organizational capital and management practices are the most important determinants to explain intensive margin firm growth over the life-cycle. Third, although less important to explain intensive margin firm growth, financial frictions are an important determinant of firm exit, conditional on firm age.

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.

We analyse in a theoretical framework the link between real-time and day-ahead market performance in a hydro-based and imperfectly competitive wholesale electricity market. Theoretical predictions of the model are tested on data from the Nordic power exchange, Nord Pool Spot (NPS). We reject the hypothesis that prices at NPS were at their competitive levels throughout the period under examination. The empirical approach uses equilibrium prices and quantities and does not rely on bid data nor on estimation of demand or marginal cost functions.

This study investigates firm survival and employment growth of start-ups by unemployed people in East and West Germany as promoted by the Work Support Act (so called bridging allowances). In 1994, the services provided were improved considerably, which led to a sharp increase in the number of start-ups by the unemployed. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of newly founded firms from the ZEW Firm Start-up Panel. The sample contains firms which were founded between 1993 and 1995 and could be observed at least one year after their foundation in 4 regions of East and 11 regions of West Germany. In the econometric analysis, self-selection effects are taken into account by using simultaneous models of start-up promotion and firm development. While firm survival seems to be negatively affected by foundation from unemployment, especially in the East German regions, an influence on employment growth is not evident.

We examine a simple theory of altruism in which players' payoffs are linear in their own monetary income and their opponents. The weight on the opponent's income is private information and varies in the population, depending, moreover, on what the opponent's coefficient is believed to be. Using results of ultimatum experiments and the final round of a centipede experiment, we are able to pin down relatively accurately what the distribution of altruism (and spite) in the population is. This distribution is then used with a reasonable degree of success to explain the results of the earlier rounds of centipede and the results of some public goods contribution games. In addition, we show that in a market game where the theory of selfish players does quite well, the theory of altruism makes exactly the same predictions as the theory of selfish players. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C70, C72, D90, D92.

Building on evidence that (a) productivity growth from learning by doing diminishes as experience accumulates with a technology and (b) learning by doing is largely specific to each production technology, this paper models a firm's decision of when to update its technology. The model implies that technology updates endogenously bring large drops in productivity. The model also implies that technology updates are more likely in a boom than in a recession since a high rate of production enables the firm to learn more quickly about the new technology. The forces in this model may help explain some features of plant and industry level data, such as the procyclicality of investment (including plant investment spikes) and the modest correlation between labor input and productivity. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: O31, L6, D92.

In this paper the corporate investment decision under financial restrictions is investigated with Belgian firm data from 1984 to 1992. An investment Euler equation is derived from a dynamic optimization model with debt ceilings and an elastic credit supply. The model is estimated by GMM for different firm groups. An important aspect is that the sample is split according to a firm's association with coordination centers. These centers have become the major external funding source of corporate investment in Belgium since 1986. The estimation results show the dependence of corporate investment on financial factors, both for non-coordination center as well as coordination center firms. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.

We experimentally test the price-setting behavior of firms in the Rotemberg (1982) model in order to explain puzzles in the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC). By constructing categories and a quantitative measure that compare behavior with optimum we find heterogeneous price-setting behavior by degree of information acquired about the future. Subjects rarely use past information, but overweight their own past price. We study the impact of heterogeneous price-setting behavior on estimated theoretically derived and hybrid Phillips curves. We find support for features of both NKPCs in our findings at the micro level. But the hybrid NKPC has a superior fit.

In "new" new international trade theory, whether firms export or not are determined by their productivity. These models assume that firms enter a market to find their productivity levels revealed to them as in a lottery. In this paper we propose an alternative way to model whether firms export or not, namely as a firm-level decision akin to an investment decision with a real option value. We show that endogenizing the export decision is consistent with patterns of productivity and exporting reported in the empirical literature.

Summary It is frequently observed that the implementation of green policies is delayed compared to the initial announcement. Considering a setting with a representative monopolist extracting a nonrenewable resource, we demonstrate that announcing a green policy, but then delaying its implementation, is associated with a larger cumulative extraction at any point in time than announcing a late implementation of this policy at the outset.

We study the investment timing problem where two firms that compete for investment preemption know in advance the time at which the economic condition changes. We show that the so-called Bad News Principle applies to the leader firm’s investment decision near maturity in many cases. This result indicates that the option value to wait does have an impact even in a competitive situation, which is in contrast to the previous literature.

When external capital markets are stressed they may not reallocate resources between firms. We show that resource allocation within firms' internal capital markets provides an important force countervailing financial market dislocation. Using data on U.S. conglomerates we empirically verify that firms shift resources between industries in response to shocks to the financial sector. We estimate a structural model of internal capital markets to separately identify and quantify the forces driving the reallocation decision and illustrate how these forces interact with external capital market stress. The frictions in internal capital markets drive a large wedge between productivity and investment: the weaker (stronger) division obtains too much (little) capital, as though it is 12 (9) percent more (less) productive than it really is. The cost of accessing external capital funds quadruples during extreme financial market dislocations, making resource allocation within firms significantly cheaper. The estimated model allows us to simulate the propagation of the 2007/2008 financial market dislocation. The counterfactual out of sample simulated data is remarkably consistent with the actual data and shows that improved resource allocation in internal capital markets offset financial market stress during the recent financial crisis by 16% to 30% relative to firms with no internal capital markets.

We evaluate differences in investment behavior between stock market listed and privately held firms in the U.S. using a rich new data source on private firms. Listed firms invest less and are less responsive to changes in investment opportunities compared to observably similar, matched private firms, especially in industries in which stock prices are particularly sensitive to current earnings. These differences do not appear to be due to unobserved differences between public and private firms, how we measure investment opportunities, lifecycle differences, or our matching criteria. We suggest that the patterns we document are most consistent with theoretical models emphasizing the role of managerial myopia.

We study how learning affects an uninformed monopolist's supply and investment decisions under multiplicative uncertainty in demand. The monopolist is uninformed because it does not know one of the parameters defining the distribution of the random demand. Observing prices reveals this information slowly. We first show how to incorporate Bayesian learning into dynamic programming by focusing on sufficient statistics and conjugate families of distributions. We show their necessity in dynamic programming to be able to solve dynamic programs either analytically or numerically. This is important since it is not true that a solution to the infinite-horizon program can be found either analytically or numerically for any kinds of distributions. We then use specific distributions to study the monopolist's behavior. Specifically, we rely on the fact that the family of normal distributions with an unknown mean is a conjugate family for samples from a normal distribution to obtain closed-form solutions for the optimal supply and investment decisions. This enables us to study the effect of learning on supply and investment decisions, as well as the steady state level of capital. Our findings are as follows. Learning affects the monopolist's behavior. The higher the expected mean of the demand shock given its beliefs, the higher the supply and the lower the investment. Although learning does not affect the steady state level of capital since the uninformed monopolist becomes informed in the limit, it reduces the speed of convergence to the steady state.

Sustainability and economic relevance of dividend policies are addressed in terms of an optimal control model set forth by Feichtinger et al. (2007), by means of which two different capitalization measures, accounting for dividends and capital gains, can be given explicit representation. In the light of the theory of capital tailored by Dorfman (1969), an intertemporal economic measure of shareholder value is introduced, together with the associated shadow price. Relevant tradeoffs and scale effects are thoroughly discussed, in connection with the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance framework. The ratio between the value function and the hamiltonian function is conjectured to represent a sound parallel to the price-earnings ratio. The lens property of the model provides a setting for discussing conditions for the rationality of myopic policymaking.

The market for law professors fulfils the conditions for a hog cycle: in the short run, supply cannot be extended or limited; future law professors must be hired soon after they first present themselves, or leave the market; demand is inelastic. Using a comprehensive German dataset, we show that the number of market entries today is significantly negatively correlated with the number of market entries 8 years ago. This is quite precisely the time young scholars on average take to prepare for the market. To get this estimate, we detrend the data, and we control for the size of student cohorts when these candidates enter university. This control variable mediates the effect of birth cohorts when candidates are born, which themselves exhibit negative autocorrelation, with a lag of some 20 years. Using our statistical model, we make out of sample predictions for the German academic market in law until 2020.

The paper has two objectives. The first is to construct a dynamic model of research joint ventures (RJVs) in which firms competing in the product market cooperate in investing to improve generic manufacturing technology. The second objective is to analyze cooperative research led by SEMATECH in the semiconductor industry using the dynamic model. The estimation consists of two stages. In the first stage, consumer demand is estimated using product level data, and state variables are constructed to reflect a technological advance and an evolution of firms' competitiveness in the product market. In the second stage, research expenditure level and firms' value functions are computed for every combination of the state variables as solutions to the dynamic model. I also compute firms' research expenditures for competitive research by making firms unilaterally invest in research. The results show that in RJVs firms' research expenditures go down to one fifth of what they would spend in competitive research. Lower research expenditure results in higher net profits in RJVs, although variable profits are similar in all regimes. RJVs are also more likely to generate higher consumer surplus than competitive research. This is because, while consumers benefit from more frequent introductions of higher quality products in competitive research, they occasionally pay higher prices than they do in RJVs for the same quality products. The net effect is that consumers are hurt more by higher price in competitive research than by less frequent introductions of new products in RJVs. Firms also make different research decisions for the same changes in the product market conditions, depending on whether they cooperate or compete in research

Firms spend substantial resources on marketing and selling. Interpreting this as evidence of frictions in product markets, which require firms to spend resources on customer acquisition, this article develops a search theoretic model of firm dynamics in frictional product markets. Introducing search frictions generates long-term customer relationships, rendering the customer base a state variable for firms, which is sluggish to adjust. This affects: the level and volatility of firm investment, profits, value, sales and markups, the timing of firm responses to shocks, and the relationship between investment and Tobin's q. We document support for these predictions in firm-level data from Compustat, using cross-industry variation in selling expenses to quantify differences in the degree of friction across markets.

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.

This paper models the investment behavior of a multi‐asset firm with market power that accumulates valuable intangible assets to complement the IT capital. The investment model is estimated using data from Spanish banks on assets of different nature: material (branches, financial), immaterial (advertising and IT), and intangible (training of workers). The paper estimates that the representative bank spends five additional Euros per Euro invested in IT‐related assets in complementary intangible assets or, equivalently, intangibles amount to approximately 10 percent of the economic value of the representative bank. The remaining economic value is distributed between 28 percent from rents attributed to market power, and 62 percent to the cost of market‐purchased assets.

Using a panel of five Asian economies – Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand – over the period 1995–2007 we analyze the links between firm survival and financial development. We find that traditionally used measures of financial development play an important role in influencing firm survival. When stock markets become larger or more liquid firms’ survival chances improve. On the contrary, we show that higher levels of financial intermediation can increase firm failures. We also find that the beneficial effects of stock market development are more pronounced during the later years of our sample, while the adverse effects of bank intermediation have declined over time. Finally, large firms are more likely to benefit from developments in financial markets compared to small firms.

This paper aims to shed light on some of the major allocative consequences of financial market bubbles. In March 1997, the Neuer Markt in Germany opened. Six years later, in June 2003, it closed forever. In the interim period lay the spectacular rise and fall of the first and most important European market for hi-tech stocks. Given investors' frenzy, the Neuer Markt was a special kind of natural experiment. For some time, financing constraints were virtually non-existent. Our model of corporate financing shows that bubbles on financial markets will induce entrepreneurs and providers of external finance to enter the 'wrong' contract. Incentive compatibility constraints designed to guarantee that corporate decision-makers behave constructively turn out to be invalid, and managers will know this before shareholders do. Thus, faulty valuation by stock markets may directly induce destructive corporate behaviour: slack, empire building, excessive risk-taking, and fraud. At the time of the IPO, a huge amount of liquidity is injected into the companies, and a dynamic analysis of the balance sheet ratios and income statement items in the following years can teach us the ways in which this liquidity is diffused. We analyse the corresponding dynamics of total assets, tangible assets and equity, as well as the evolution of sales and profits for 204 German non-financial companies out of a total of 326 companies that had their IPO at the Neuer Markt. On the basis of consecutive annual accounts, we retrace the events using a dynamic flow of funds analysis. We assess the explanatory power of our model using non-parametric methods [Median tests, Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests, Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests] and quantile regressions. Our results indicate that valuation has strong and systematic effects on incentives. Experience, as proxied by age at IPO, is shown to have a beneficial effect, whereas support by VC and PE firms does not seem to matter for the success of the enterprises considered.

This paper examines whether financial constraints affect firms’ investment decisions for older (larger) firms. We compare a group of unbanked firms to firms that rely on formal financing. Specifically, we combine data from the Spanish Mercantile Registry and the Bank of Spain Credit Registry (CIR) to classify firms according to their number of banking relations: one, several, or none. Our empirical strategy combines two approaches based on a common theoretical model. First, using a standard Euler equation adjustment cost approach to investment, we find that single-banked firms in our sample are most likely to exhibit cash flow sensitivity while unbanked firms are not. Second, using structural maximum likelihood estimation, we find that unbanked firms have a financial structure which is close to credit subject to moral hazard with unobserved effort, whereas single-banked firms have a financial structure which is more limited, as in an exogenously imposed traditional debt model. Firms in the unbanked category do not rely on bonds, equity, or formal financial markets, but rather on other firms in a financial or family-tied group (with either pyramidal or informal structure). We are among the first to document the importance of such groups in a European country. We control for reverse causality by treating bank relationships as endogenous and/or by appropriate stratifications of the sample.

We present a dynamic agency model in which the LBO fund may write the entrepreneur's project off at the end of the starting stage to invest in a competitive project. The two partners provide unobservable efforts in both stages to enhance the productivity of the acquired company. We show that under restrictive conditions, the debt-equity contracts induce the entrepreneur and the LBO fund to provide the first best efforts under restrictive conditions in the two stages. Moreover, the write-off threat boosts the incentives of the entrepreneur and the LBO fund such that they provide high efforts. If the compensation cost is exogenous, the sharing rule of this cost depends on the quality of the competitive project. The entrepreneur and the bank share the amount of compensation if it is not very profitable. Otherwise, the whole amount of compensation is pledged to the entrepreneur. If the compensation's amount is endogenous, in order to induce the entrepreneur to provide high effort, the optimal financial contracts must give her the entire compensation's revenue.

We study the competition to acquire the exclusive right to operate an infrastructure service, by comparing two different specifications for the financial proposals - "lowest price to consumers" vs "highest concession fee", and two alternative contractual arrangements: a contract which imposes the obligation to immediately undertake the investment required to operate the concessioned service and a contract which simply assigns to the winning bidder the right to supply the market at a date of her choosing. By comparing the returns of these alternative award criteria and concessioning conditions, we show that concessioning without imposing rollout time limits may or may not provide a higher expected social value, depending on the bidding rule used to allocate the contract. In turn, the relative advantages of each award criterion are affected by the concessioning conditions.

In a standard adverse selection world, asymmetric information about product quality leads to quality deterioration in the market. Suppose that a higher investment level makes the realization of high quality more likely. Then, if consumers observe the investment (but not the realization of product quality) before purchase, they can infer the probability distribution of high and low quality that may be put on the market. We uncover two effects that may lead the firm to overinvest in quality compared to a market with full information: first, an adverse selection effect according to which a sufficiently large investment can avoid adverse selection and, second, an efficiency effect according to which a larger investment reduces the probability of having in the market low quality products that are not socially valuable.

The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that in particular financially constrained firms lease a higher share of their assets to mitigate problems of asymmetric information. The assumptions are tested under a GMM framework which simultaneously controls for endogeneity problems and firms' fixed effects. We find that the share of total annual lease expenses attributable to either finance or operating leases is considerably higher for smaller firms with higher average interest rates and high-growth firms - those likely to face higher agency-cost premiums on marginal financing. Furthermore, our results confirm the substitution of leasing and debt financing for lessee firms. However, we find no evidence that firms use leasing as an instrument to reduce their tax burdens. Keywords: Leasing, financial constraints, asymmetric information, GMM JEL Classifications: D23, D92, C23

An analytical framework is developed to study the repercussions between endogenous capital- and labor-saving technical change and population aging. Following an intuition often attributed to Hicks (1932), I ask whether and how population aging aff ects the relative scarcity of factors of production, relative factor prices, and the direction of induced technical change. Aging is equivalent to an increase in the old-age dependency ratio of an OLG-economy with two-period lived individuals. In this framework aging increases the relative scarcity of labor with respect to capital. Therefore, there will be more labor- and less capital-saving technical change. Unless there are contemporaneous knowledge spillovers across innovating firms technical change induced by a small increase in the old-age dependency ratio has no first-order effect on current GDP. The presence of capital-saving technical change is shown to imply that the economy's steady-state growth rate is independent of its age structure.

This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of firms' investment composition choices in the presence of credit constraints. Following a negative and persistent aggregate productivity shock, firms shift into short-term investments because they produce more pledgeable output and because they help alleviate future borrowing constraints. This produces a short-run dampening of the effects of the shock, at the expense of lower long-term investment and future output, relative to an economy with no credit market imperfections. The effects are exacerbated by a steepening of the term structure of interest rates that further encourages a shift towards short-term investments in the short-run. Small temporary shocks to the severity of financing frictions generate large and long-lasting effects on output through their impact on the composition of investment. A positive financial shock produces much stronger effects than an identical negative shock, while the responses to positive and negative shocks to aggregate productivity are roughly symmetric. Finally, the paper introduces a novel explanation for the countercyclicality of financing constraints of firms.

The Basel Accords promote the adoption of capital adequacy requirements to increase the banking sector's stability. Unfortunately, this type of regulation can hamper economic growth by shifting banks' portfolios from more productive, risky investment projects toward less productive but safer projects. This paper introduces banking regulation in an overlapping-generations model and studies how it affects economic growth, banking sector stability, and welfare. In this model, a banking crisis is initiated by an aggregated shock (in the risky sector) in a banking system with implicit bailout, and banking regulation is modeled as a constraint on the maximal share of banks' portfolios that can be allocated to risky assets. This model allows us to evaluate quantitatively the key trade-off, inherent in this type of regulation, between ensuring banking stability and fostering economic growth. The model implies an optimal level of regulation that prevents crises but at the same time is detrimental to growth. We find that the overall effect of optimal regulation on social welfare is positive when productivity shocks are sufficiently high (for example, in the subprime banking crisis episode) and economic agents are sufficiently risk-averse. Finally, we find that there is a trade-off between regulating the economy upfront (i.e. before the shock) and facing the challenge of making a huge bailout after the crisis.

In the spirit of Harberger, we apply a dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and estimate the excess burden stemming from the tax-induced distortion in the allocation of capital across the corporate and the non-corporate sectors in Germany. In doing so, we perform a counterfactual analysis and ask how the allocation of capital across sectors would change compared with a sector-neutral tax system which assures an identical effective tax burden on both sectors. Our estimates suggest that the excess burden per period ranges from 2.0 to 3.6 billion Euros or from about 0.1 to 0.16 per cent of GDP. In present value terms, the excess burden translates to about 104 billion Euros or 4.7 per cent of GDP. In order to identify the impact of the firm’s financial behaviour on the size of the emerging excess burden, we perform several sensitivity analyses with regard to debt financing, external equity financing and debt constraints via agency cost.

In this article, we analyse stylized facts for Germany's business cycle at the firm level. Based on longitudinal firm-level data from the Bundesbank's balance sheet statistics covering, on average, 55 000 firms per year from 1971 to 1998, we estimate transition probabilities of a firm in a certain real sales growth regime switching to another regime in the next period, e.g. whether a firm that has witnessed a high growth rate is likely to stay in a regime of high growth or is bound to switch to a regime of low growth in the subsequent period. We find that these probabilities depend on the business cycle position.

We show that a cross-listing allows a firm to make better investment decisions becauseit enhances stock price informativeness. This theory of cross-listings yields several predictions.In particular, it implies that the sensitivity of investment to stock prices should belarger for cross-listed firms. Moreover, the increase in value generated by a cross-listing(the “cross-listing premium”) should be positively related to the size of growth opportunitiesand negatively related to the quality of managerial information. We also analyze theeffects of the geography of ownership (the distribution of holdings between foreign and domesticinvestors) on the cross-listing premium. In particular, we show that the sensitivityof the cross-listing premium to the size of growth opportunities increases when holdings(resp. market shares) become more evenly distributed between foreign and domestic investors(resp. markets). Last, we show that concentration of trading in the home market(“flow-back”) can indeed increase the cross-listing premium for some firms.

The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey contains detailed information on the financial constraints faced by a large sample of UK manufacturers. This paper uses the quarterly CBI Industrial Trends Survey firm level data between January 1989 and October 1999. The cleaned sample contains 49,244 quarterly observations on 5,196 firms. As more than 63% of the observations refer to firms with less than 200 employees, the data set is especially well suited for comparing large and small companies. The data set is presented and a new method of checking the informational content of the data is developed. Whereas the relationship between investment activity and financial constraints is theoretically ambivalent due to simultaneity, the link between financial constraints on the one hand and the prevalence and duration of capacity gaps on the other should be unambiguously positive. Looking at the relationship between both types of constraints, two important results emerge. First, there is shown to be informational content in the survey data on financial constraints. Specifically, financially constrained firms take longer to close capacity gaps. This indicates that financial constraints do indeed play a part in the investment process. Second, small firms close their capacity gaps faster than large firms do, but financial constraints seem to be of higher relevance to their adjustment dynamics.

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic un-certainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non{financial US firms drawn from the COM-PUSTAT quarterly database covering the period 1991{2001. The estimates confirm that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, firms decrease their levels of leverage. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our results are robust with respect to the inclusion of the index of leading indicators.

In this paper two models of investment stemming from the neoclassical theory are derived in a unifying framework. The Q type models view the stock market valuation of a firm as an all-encompassing variable determining its investment decisions, while the Euler equation for investment highlights the dynamic nature of firms’ decisionmaking. A sample of 779 UK manufacturing companies listed in the London Stock Exchange in the period 1971-1990 is used to compare the empirical fit of the two different models of investment. Despite a number of difficulties, the Q model appears to be empirically superior delivering the desirable consistency between theory and data.

This study tests for the presence of real options effects induced by uncertainty and (partial) irreversibility on fixed capital investment using Italian company data. Our approach recognizes that firm-level investment spending may, itself, be aggregated over multiple investment decisions in separate types of capital goods and empha-sizes effects of uncertainty on short-run investment dynamics. Using a survey-based measure of uncertainty related to the assessment of managers responsible for the firms' investment plans, we find evidence of heterogeneous and nonlinear dynamics pointing to a slower adjustment of investment in response to demand shocks at higher levels of uncertainty. Our results also point to an additional source of nonlinearity originating from a convex response of investment to demand shocks. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund

The link between investment and finance usually enters the empirical literature in the form of financial constraints which are defined as the wedge between the costs of internal and external finance or as the risk of being rationed on the credit market. In this context, the sensitivity of investment with respect to single internal or external finance indicators is assumed to be appropriate to proxy for these constraints. However, enterprises that rely on external funds do not only face this external finance premium and potential borrowing limits, but also the risk of not being able to meet their repayment obligations and thus the risk of bankruptcy. If the risk of bankruptcy enters the profit maximization of the firm, the resulting empirical investment function includes the probability of survival as an additional explanatory variable. This modified neoclassical investment equation is tested with West German panel data which include more than 6000 enterprises and cover a period of 12 years. The empirical results confirm the assumption that the risk of bankruptcy is an important determinant of the enterprises' investment behaviour. Additionally, the results raise the question whether financial constraints respective cash flow sensitivities are the appropriate way to test for the influence of the financial sphere on the investment decisions of enterprises, or whether bankruptcy probabilities better account for these potential financial risks.

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and price shocks. We find that demand uncertainty depresses planned and realized investment, while price uncertainty is insignificant. This is consistent with the behavior of monopolistic firms with irreversible capital (Caballero, 1991). Further, firms revise their investment plans very little. They may do so in response to new information on sales growth, but not as a result of reduced uncertainty. JEL Classification: D21, D24, D81, D92, C23