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Theories of irreversible investment suggest a negative relation between investment and uncertainty, and nonlinear adjustment costs open for asymmetries in the adjustment of fixed capital. We propose an econometric modelling approach to estimate and test the key predictions of modern investment theory, including asymmetric dynamics and various uncertainty indicators. Our application on a data set from the oil industry offers empirical support for both asymmetric dynamics and uncertainty in oil and gas investment.

A growing number of studies investigate the determinants of happiness, or subjective well-being. Few, however, specifically examine the financial aspects of subjective well-being. This study estimates the determinants of subjective financial wellbeing (SWB) for a city in the American Southwest. The results show that income, health insurance, home ownership, and children at home have significant impacts on financial well-being. Missing survey values are estimated using multiple imputation; model results with and without imputed data are compared. Estimates from the complete case model show bias compared with the multiple imputation model. Home ownership and children at home are important predictors of financial well-being in the multiple imputation model but not the complete cases model.

This paper focuses on the inter-relationship between corporate governance, financing of corporate growth and stock market development in emerging countries. It explores both theoretically and empirically the nature of the inter-relationships between these phenomena, as well their implications for economic policy. It concentrates on how corporate growth is financed, an area where the literature has identified important anomalies in relation to corporate behaviour and governance. The paper provides new information and analysis on this subject for the 1990s which it is shown leads to further anomalies from the perspective of extant economic theory. It also comments briefly on the recent research on the legal system, corporate laws, corporate governance and corporate performance. In considering the latter issues the paper examines more closely the evolution of the financing of corporate growth and of stock market development in the specific case of the Indian economy in the 1980s and 1990s.

We study Aumann and Serrano's (2008) risk index for sums of gambles that are not necessarily independent. We show that if the dependent parts of two gambles are similarly ordered, or more generally positively quadrant dependent, then the risk index of the sum of two gambles is always larger than the minimum of the risk indices of the two gambles. For negative dependence, the risk index of the sum is always smaller than the maximum of the two risk indices. The above results agree with our intuitions well. For example, the result for negative dependence agrees with our intuition of risk diversification. Thus this result can be considered another attractive property of Aumann and Serrano's risk index.