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Celem artykulu jest analiza pozycji konkurencyjnej najwiekszych przedsiebiorstw branzy budowlanej z wojewodztwa podlaskiego, na tle sektora w latach 2010 – 2012. Do analizy wykorzystany zostal tzw. Radar Nagashimy, pozwalajacy okreslic w sposob syntetyczny wzgledne ksztaltowanie sie wybranego zestawu wskaznikow analizowanych podmiotow na tle konkurentow z branzy budowlanej. Z przeprowadzonej analizy konkurencyjnosci najwiekszych przedsiebiorstw branzy budowlanej z wojewodztwa podlaskiego na tle sektora wynika, iz w latach 2010 - 2012 obserwowany byl zarowno wzrost, jak i spadek wartosci wybranych wskaznikow, uzyskanych przez analizowane podmioty w obszarach: rentownosci, stabilnosci finansowej, aktywnosci kapitalowej, wzrostu i wydajnosci. W 2012 r. w porownaniu do roku poprzedniego zaobserwowano m.in. pogorszenie wartosci: niektorych wskaznikow rentownosci, wskaznikow wzrostu oraz wydajnosci pracy.

A stimulus programme allowed .rms in Italy to receive a tax credit for R&D expenditure in 2009. We show large heterogeneity in the .rm response. Among .rms that usually smooth R&D through time, the tax credit did not have any effect. Among traditional .rms, the response was mainly dependent on the amount of internal liquidity. Firms with relative large cash holdings raised R&D with respect to 2008 while .rms with low levels of cash did not. The latter mainly used the tax credit to mitigate the negative impact of the credit crunch.

Evaluating an industrial opportunity often means to engage in financial modeling which results in estimation of a large amount of economic and accounting data, which are then gathered in an economically rational framework: the pro forma financial statements. While the standard net present value (NPV) condenses all the available pieces of information into a single metric, we make full use of the crucial information supplied in the pro forma financial statements and give a more detailed account of how economic value is created. In particular, we construct a general model, allowing for varying interest rates, which decomposes the project into investment side and financing side and quantifies the value created by either side; an equity/debt decomposition is also accomplished, which enables to appreciate the role of debt in adding or subtracting value to equityholders. Further, the major role of accounting rates of return as value drivers is highlighted, and new relative measures of worth are introduced: the project ROA and the project WACC, which aggregate information deriving from the period rates of return. To achieve these results, we make use of the Average-Internal-Rate-of-Return (AIRR) approach, recently introduced, which rests on capital-weighted arithmetic means and sets a direct relation between holding period rates and NPV.

In this paper, we explore a dynamic theory of investment and costly managerial turnover given agency conflicts between the firm manager and investors. We incorporate the possibility of the successive replacement of managers until the firm is finally liquidated, and develop a continuous-time agency model with the q-theory of investment. We derive the dynamic variations of average q, marginal q, and the optimal investment?capital ratio surrounding manager turnover. Furthermore, we also indicate that the firm’s optimal replacement/ retention decision becomes more permissive with the frequency of the replacement of managers. Our theoretical findings yield empirical implications for the joint dynamics of investment and CEO turnover policy, which are consistent with evidence provided by the existing empirical literature, and provide novel testable hypotheses.

What began as a financial crisis in the United States in 2007-2008 quickly evolved into a massive crisis of the global real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy - in particular, to real investment and labor employment by nonfinancial firms. We analyze whether and to what extent firms are able to compensate for the shortage in loan supply by switching banks and by using other types of financing. The analysis is based on a unique matched data set for Germany that contains firm-level financial statements for the 2004-2010 period together with the financial statements of each firm's relationship bank(s). We use instrumental variable estimations in first differences to eliminate firm- and bankspecific effects. The first stage results show that banks that suffered losses due to proprietary trading activities at the onset of the financial crisis reduced their lending more strongly than non-affected banks. In the second stage, we find that firms whose relationship banks reduce credit supply downsize their real investment and labor employment significantly. This effect is larger for firms that are unable to provide much collateral. We document that firms partially offset reduced credit supply by establishing new bank relationships, using internal funds, and issuing new equity.

Mutual fund investors are supposed to make long-term investments instead of striving for quick fortunes. However, the dynamics of funds' ability to generate abnormal returns over their lifetime is still an unattended issue. This paper provides evidence on the liability of newness and liability of aging theory that funds' investment skill changes to the positive or negative over time. Our results find strong support for an underperformance of mature funds consistent with the liability of aging theory. Furthermore, the observed diseconomies of life result from older funds pursuing less innovative investment strategies. The lack of innovation manifests in less performance enhancing trading and fewer investments in hard-to-value stocks. Still, we provide evidence that less performance sensitive as well as non-institutional investors seek investments in mature funds and that they benefit from more stable investment styles and performance outcomes.

Business strategy can be defined as a firm's plan to generate economic profits based on lower cost, better quality, or new products. The analysis of business strategy is thus at the intersection of market competition and a firm's efforts to secure persistently superior performance via investments in better management and organization. We empirically analyze the interaction of firms' business strategies and their managerial practices using a unique, detailed dataset on business strategy, internal firm organization, performance and innovation, which is representative of the entire Canadian economy. Our empirical results show that measures of business strategy are strongly correlated with firm performance, both in the cross-section and over time, and even after controlling for unobserved profit shocks exploiting intermediates utilization. Results are particularly striking for innovation, as firms with some priority in business strategies are significantly more likely to innovate than firms without any strategic priority. Furthermore, our analysis highlights that the relationship between strategy and management is driven by two key organizational trade-offs: employee initiative vs. coordination as well as exploration of novel business opportunities vs. exploitation of existing profit sources.

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.

From a theoretical perspective the link between the speed and scope of rapid labor reallocation and productivity growth or inequalities remains unclear. Do reallocations with more flows tend to produce higher productivity growth? Does such link appear at the expense of higher inequalities? We explore the rich evidence from earlier studies on worker flows in the period of massive and rapid labor reallocation, i.e. the economic transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy in Central and Eastern Europe. We apply the tools typical for a meta-analysis to verify the empirical regularities between labor flows and productivity growth as well as inequalities. We collected over 450 estimates of job flows from the literature and use these inputs to estimate the short-run and long-run relationship between job flows, labor productivity and inequalities. Our findings suggest relatively weak and short term links with productivity for job destruction/separations. On the other hand, data reveal a strong pattern for inequalities more churning during reallocation is associated with a permanent level efect towards increased Gini indexes.

Crop rotations are known to have two main kinds of economic effects: direct effects on potential yields and on the productivity of different inputs, and indirect effects on economically optimal input levels, especially pesticides and fertilizers. The main objective of this article is to uncover the mechanisms through which crop rotation effects affect the acreage choices of forward-looking farmers, in a dynamic programming framework. Whereas most models considering acreage choices with crop rotation effects are based on discrete choice models at the plot level, our model considers a farm level strategy. This implies that our theoretical modeling framework is closely related to the models commonly used for empirically investigating farmers’ acreage choices, either in the multicrop econometric literature or in the mathematical programming literature. We provide original results aimed at characterizing the properties of optimal acreage choices accounting for crop rotation effects and constraints in an uncertain context. Using a stochastic programming approach together with a Lagrangian approach we show that optimal dynamic acreage choices can be formally characterized as static acreage choices with contingent renting/lending markets for acreages with specific preceding crops. The crop rotation constraint Lagrange multipliers provide the renting/lending prices of acreages with specific crop histories. The results presented in the article are mainly theoretical. Our modeling framework can easily be implemented in practice since it mainly considers quadratic programming problems and their solution functions.

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.

How important are bank loans for corporate investment? A joint research paper by DIW Berlin, University of Hohenheim and Freie Universitaet Berlin shows that the overall amount borrowed by firms decreases if their relationship banks reduce their credit supply. As a consequence, firms have to downsize their investment spending and labor employment. This way, bank distress spills over to the real economy. However, the reduction in investment is smaller than the reduction in banks’ credit supply as firms are able to mitigate part of the shortage in credit supply by using other sources of financing. Welche Bedeutung haben Bankkredite für Unternehmensinvestitionen? Eine gemeinsame Studie des DIW Berlin, der Universität Hohenheim und der Freien Universität Berlin zeigt, dass ein Rückgang des Kreditangebots der Hausbanken zu einer geringeren Fremdkapitalaufnahme von Unternehmen führt. Dies wiederum reduziert deren Investitionstätigkeit und Arbeitsnachfrage. Banken, die über ausreichend Eigenmittel für die Vergabe von Unternehmenskrediten verfügen, sind daher wichtig für die gesamtwirtschaftliche Investitionstätigkeit und das Schaffen von Arbeitsplätzen. Allerdings führt ein Rückgang des Bankkreditangebots nicht in vollem Umfang zu geringeren Investitionen, da Unternehmen ein verringertes Kreditangebot durch Verwendung anderer Finanzierungsformen teilweise ausgleichen können.

What determines the technology that a country adopts? While many factors affect technological adoption, the efficiency of the country's financial system may also play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive intermediation. The ability of an intermediary to monitor and control the cash flows of a firm plays an important role in the technology adoption decision. Can such a theory help to explain the differences in total factor productivity and establishment-size distributions across India, Mexico, and the United States? A quantitative illustration suggests the answer is yes.

This paper considers the investment decision of a firm where it has to decide about the timing and capacity. We obtain that in a fast growing market, right after investment the firm produces below capacity, where the utilization rate (the proportion of capacity that is used for production right after the investment) increases with market uncertainty for a very big market trend, and shows no monotonicity for a moderately large market trend. On the other hand we get that, for a slowly growing or shrinking market, the firm produces up to capacity right after investment. In the intermediate case, the firm produces up to capacity right after investment when uncertainty is low and below capacity when uncertainty is high, whereas the utilization rate decreases with the market uncertainty.

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.

The valuation framework inherent to the neo-Austrian theory of capital set forth by Hicks’ (1973) is discussed in terms of a fundamental formula which disentangles the profitability associated with the scale of operation from the internal rate of return of the production process. The formula is employed to tailor a perspective on the value of investment prospects, meant to complement the insights embodied by Tobin’s q metric. Balance sheet recessions are briefly discussed as a cogent line of application of our formula. Potential lines of progress are envisioned.

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 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

We compare sequential and bundle procurement auctions in a framework of successive procurement situations, where current success positively or negatively affects future market opportunities. We find that in bundle auctions procurement cost is lower and less risky than in sequential standard auctions, but still higher than in the optimal sequential auction. Only a sequential second price auction leads to the efficient outcome.

We present a theoretical model in tourism economics, assuming that the market for tourism is an oligopoly with differentiated products. Destinations (i.e., countries, regions, sites or even firms) can invest in order to improve their carrying capacity that can be interpreted as the stock of physical, natural or cultural resources. Tourism flows yield current revenues, but they are usually detrimental for the cultural or natural resource stock over time. We find the solution of the dynamic model, and in particular we find the open-loop Nash equilibrium of the game among the destinations, under alternative settings, depending on whether the arrivals are exogenous or endogenous, and depending on whether the degree of differentiation among destinations is exogenous or endogenous. The model is rather general, and it can provide answers to different specific questions, like the choice between mass- vs. elite-tourism development strategies; the effect of the number of competing products upon profits; the optimal degree of product differentiation.

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.

model.

The allowance allocation under the European emission trading schemes differs fundamentally from earlier cap-and-trade programmes, such as SO2 and NOx in the USA. Because of the sequential nature of negotiations of the overall budget, the allocation also has to follow a sequential process. If power generators anticipate that their current behaviour will affect future allowance allocation, then this can distort today's decisions. Furthermore, the national allocation plans (NAPs) contain multiple provisions dealing with existing installations, what happens to their allocation when they close, and allocations to new entrants. We provide a framework to assess the economic incentives and distortions that provisions in NAPs can have on market prices, operation and investment decisions. To this end, we use both analytic models to illustrate the effects of the incentives, and results from numerical simulation runs that estimate the magnitude of impacts from different allocation rules.

The literature on irreversible investment fails to explore the relationship between the present value of alternative strategies and appropriate risk-adjusted interest rates. We attempt to fill this gap by showing that, to avoid arbitrage opportunities, the real option¡¦s rate must be higher than the rate of the immediate strategy. Further, we explain how irreversibility influences the risk-return combination of competing strategies acting as a pure risk factor.

This paper compares a private ownership (competitive) economy, a labormanaged economy and a capital-managed economy in an overlapping-generations framework. Under standard and rather weak assumptions, the sets of equilibria for the two first economies are identical, in line with a result already shown in a static setting. We also prove that the set of competitive equilibria are included in the set of equilibria of capital-managed economies, but the converse is not true. However, using some smoothness assumptions, we show that an equilibrium of a capital-managed economy may be a competitive equilibrium.

The so-called anomalies that arise in the computation and interpretation of the Net Present Value (NPV) and the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) can be easily overcome if the properties of the NPV function are taken into account and it is clearly defined what is an investment and what is a credit. All the roots of the NPV function have economic meaning and, when there is at least one IRR, the NPV and the IRR criteria agree.

This article develops a multi-period production model to examine the optimal dynamic behaviour of a large monopolistic value-maximizing firm that manipulates its valuation as well as the price of its output. In the pre-commitment equilibrium the firm’s output and labour demand are decreased, while the price of consumption is increased, as compared with its competitive counterpart. Profits and the firm's value can, however, be either increased or decreased. In the time-consistent equilibrium the firm’s output and labour demand are increased, while the price of consumption is decreased. More strikingly, the profits in every period are decreased, and may even go negative, while the firm's value can be either lower or higher than in the competitive benchmark. In the continuous-time limit, while the pre-commitment equilibrium retains its basic discrete-time structure, the time-consistent equilibrium tends to the limit of zero profits and hence zero firm's value.

This paper provides a theory of venture capital financing based on the complementarity between the financing and advising roles of venture capitalists. We examine the interaction between the staging of investment, that characterizes young firms with a high growth potential, and the double-sided moral hazard problem arising from the managerial contributions of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The optimal contractual arrangements have features that resemble the securities actually employed in venture capital financing. In particular, we identify an incentive-related insurance motive for making the initial financier bear the start-up's downside risk, as well as a financing motive for protecting him against dilution. This can explain the widespread use of convertible preferred stock.

We consider a simple model of international trade under uncertainty, where production takes time and is subject to uncertainty. The riskiness of production depends on the choices of the producers, not observable to the general public, and these choices are influenced by the availability and cost of credit. If investment is financed by a bond market, then a situation may arise where otherwise identical countries end up with different levels of interest and different choices of technique, which again implies differences in achieved level of welfare. Under suitable conditions on the parameters of the model, the market may not be able to supply credits to one of the countries. The introduction of financial intermediaries with the ability to control the debtors may change this situation in a direction which is welfare improving (in a suitable sense) by increasing expected output in the country with high interest rates, while opening up for new problems of asymmetric information with respect to the monitoring activity of the banks

In his famous 1987 monograph, Robert Lucas argued that further stabilizing the business cycles that persisted in the post-War era was pointless, because these cycles had a negligible effect on societal well-being. In particular, Lucas demonstrated that society should be willing to pay only a tiny fraction of its consumption expenditures per year to completely eliminate the fluctuations that prevailed over this period. This conclusion has been largely reaffirmed by subsequent studies, and has been commonly cited as evidence that policymakers should abstain from intervening to offset macroeconomic fluctuations of the magnitude that prevailed over this period. ; This paper disputes this conclusion and argues that the business cycles that prevailed over this period were costly, and thus opens the door to the possibility that stabilization policy might be desirable after all. It does this by demonstrating that business cycles can have a deleterious effect on the rate at which the economy grows over the long run. The reason is that cycles lead to volatile investment, reducing the efficiency of investment. Essentially, the fact that investment activity is concentrated in booms rather than spread out uniformly over time creates congestion effects that lower the productivity of investment. I estimate that eliminating the cyclical fluctuations that prevailed during the post-War period would have increased the growth rate of real GDP per capita in the U.S. from 2.0% per year to 2.5% per year. The cost of reduced growth from macroeconomic volatility is computed at a rate of 10% of consumption expenditures per year, over 100 times.

We introduce an efficiency wage mechanism into an innovation-driven growth model. Due to asymmetric information problems the labour market is segmented and homogeneous workers may be employed either in the non-competitive intermediate sector or in the competitive research sector. We analyse the impact that the monopoly position enjoyed by intermediate firms in the product market may have on employment, wage inequality and growth, and the sectoral distribution of workers. We find that the lower the product market competition in the capital goods sector, the higher the research employment, the lower the intermediate sector employment and the higher the growth rate. The relationships between growth and inequality, on the one hand, and between growth and employment, on the other, are both negative.

In this paper we investigate the trade-off faced by regulators who must set a price for an intermediate good somewhere between the marginal cost and the monopoly price. We utilize a growth model with monopolistic suppliers of intermediate goods. Investment in innovation is required to produce a new intermediate good. Marginal cost pricing deters innovation, while monopoly pricing maximizes innovation and economic growth at the cost of some static inefficiency. We demonstrate the existence of a second-best price above the marginal cost but below the monopoly price, which maximizes consumer welfare. Simulation results suggest that substantial reductions in consumption, production, growth, and welfare occur where regulators focus on static efficiency issues by setting prices at or near marginal cost.

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.

The paper examines the liquidity risk of a private equity firm that decides to dispose of a large holding in its portfolio. As the sale takes time, it requires a careful balancing act of the exposure to the fluctuations in the market value of the investment against the large sale-induced price depression. A mean-standard deviation utility framework is an appealing decision tool for optimizing protracted asset dispositions. The firm maximizes the expected profit from the sale strategy net of the price concession minus a penalty function for exposure to the price risk, with the penalty weight related to a loss confidence interval.

In a sequence of fascinating papers, Leland and Leland and Toft have investigated various properties of the debt and credit of a firm which keeps a constant profile of debt and chooses its bankruptcy level endogenously, to maximise the value of the equity. One feature of these papers is that the credit spreads tend to zero as the maturity tends to zero, and this is not a feature which is observed in practice. This defect of the modelling is related to the diffusion assumptions made in the papers referred to; in this paper, we take a model for the value of the firm's assets which allows for jumps, and find that the spreads do not go to zero as maturity goes to zero. The modelling is quite delicate, but it just works; analysis takes us a long way, and for the final steps we have to resort to numerical methods.

A tanulmány a mechanizmustervezés módszerével keresi meg a rugalmas nyugdíjrendszer optimális járulékkulcsát és lineáris járadékfüggvényét. Elõször a kormányzat bejelent egy járadékfüggvényt, amely a havi nyugdíjat a szolgálati idõ lineáris függvényében állapítja meg. A különbözõ élettartamú és szorgalmú egyének optimálisan választják meg szolgálati idejüket. A kormányzat nem ismeri az egyéni jellemzõket, csak eloszlásukat; s ennek alapján egy olyan optimális járadékfüggvényt választ, amely maximalizálja a társadalmi jólétet (például az egyéni hasznosságmaximumok aggregáltját) társadalmi költségvetési feltétel mellett (például az aggregált be- és kifizetések összege nulla). Az optimális járulékkulcs hasonlóan vizsgálható.* Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) kód: D86, D92, H55, This paper applies the method of mechanism design to finding an optimal linear pension-benefit rule for flexible (variable) retirement: First, the government announces a benefit function, which establishes the instantaneous benefit dependent on employment length. Individuals with different life spans and utility functions optimize their lengths of employment conditional on that benefit function. The government, knowing only the statistical distribution of the individual characteristics, but not the individual values, chooses an optimal linear benefit function, which maximizes the social welfare (e.g. the aggregated individual maxima) under a social constraint (e.g. the aggregated lifetime contribution equals the aggregated lifetime benefit). The optimal contribution rate can also be determined.

This paper studies the relationship between debt-financing and the timing of investment, under asymmetric information. In particular we show that an option to delay raises the average profitability of firms who choose to invest immediately, thereby reducing the market interest rate on debt. Moreover, the option to delay is shown to be welfare improving.

In this paper, we review the historical reasons behind the success of Swiss private banks and discuss whether they possess the attributes necessary to be successful in the future. We suggest that although Swiss banquiers are well positioned to retain their global supremacy, they do need to make important strategic decisions concerning the way they manage their businesses and the technological support they provide for their clients and advisors.

National statistical agencies frequently assume very high geometric depreciation rates in order to capture the fact that computers are usually retired after 3 or 4 years of use. However, typically the service flow that a computer generates over its useful life is roughly constant, which contradicts the geometric model of depreciation where the service flow falls at a constant rate forever. Thus a one hoss shay or light bulb model of depreciation seems to be more appropriate for computers. The paper uses Australian data on computer investment over the past 25 years to construct one hoss shay estimates of computer capital stocks and flows and considers how best to approximate these more realistic models of depreciation with a geometric model. The paper shows that under certain simplifying assumptions, a geometric model of depreciation can provide an exact approximation to an underlying one hoss shay model. This exactness result is extended to a more general model of depreciation, the Constant Efficiency Profile model. Finally, using Australian data, the paper shows how well the geometric approximation fits a one hoss shay model when the simplifying assumptions are not satisfied.

This paper studies the taxation of non-listed companies and their owners in Finland. We first describe the main features of the Finnish tax system regarding the taxation of dividends from non-listed companies. We use firm-level data to illustrate how the tax incentives are reflected in firms’ profit distribution policies. We then build a dynamic investment model that features the main characteristics of the Finnish dividend taxation. In the model, entrepreneurs face a borrowing constraint and have a consumption smoothing motive. We use the model to investigate how the current dividend taxation affects the investment incentives. The results illustrate how the current dividend taxation in certain cases distorts firms’ investment decisions. Key words: Dividend taxation, non-listed companies, firm investment.

In this paper, we analyze optimal foreign direct investment of a firm which operates in a duopolistic market. We characterize a technology spillover threshold and show that for an intensity of spillovers below this threshold, there is a unique locally asymptotic stable steady state with a positive capital stock in the developing country. Furthermore, we characterize how optimal foreign investment patterns and the investor’s value function depend on the level of technology transferred and characterize the optimal level to be used for the foreign direct investment.

We contribute to the investment-cash ow sensitivity debate by creating a new index to identify the supply of finance to firms. We find that firms that are considered constrained according to our index pay a higher interest rate on their debt, and display the highest investment-cash fl ow sensitivities. Moreover, these findings are not driven by the possible information content of cash fl ow regarding investment opportunities as we control for oppor- tunities by augmenting our empirical model with firm-level employment growth. We thus provide new evidence consistent with Campbell et al. (2012) that the cost of capital is the driving force behind investment-cash fl ow sensitivity.

We define a class of dynamic Markovian games, directional dynamic games (DDG), where directionality is represented by a strategy-independent partial order on the state space. We show that many games are DDGs, yet none of the existing algorithms are guaranteed to find any Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) of these games, much less all of them. We propose a fast and robust generalization of backward induction we call state recursion that operates on a decomposition of the overall DDG into a finite number of more tractable stage games , which can be solved recursively. We provide conditions under which state recursion finds at least one MPE of the overall DDG and introduce a recursive lexicographic search (RLS) algorithm that systematically and efficiently uses state recursion to find all MPE of the overall game in a finite number of steps. We apply RLS to find all MPE of a dynamic model of Bertrand price competition with cost-reducing investments which we show is a DDG. We provide an exact non-iterative algorithm that finds all MPE of every stage game, and prove there can be only 1, 3, or 5 of them. Using the stage games as building blocks, RLS rapidly finds and enumerates all MPE of the overall game. RLS finds a unique MPE for an alternating move version of the leapfrogging game when technology improves with probability 1, but in other cases, and in any simultaneous move version of the game, it finds a huge multiplicity of MPE that explode exponentially as the number of possible cost states increases.

We partnered with a micro-lender in Mali to randomize credit offers at the village level. Then, in no-loan control villages, we gave cash grants to randomly selected households. These grants led to higher agricultural investments and profits, thus showing that liquidity constraints bind with respect to agricultural investment. In loan-villages, we gave grants to a random subset of farmers who (endogenously) did not borrow. These farmers have lower – in fact zero – marginal returns to the grants. Thus we find important heterogeneity in returns to investment and strong evidence that farmers with higher marginal returns to investment self-select into lending programs.

In this paper we use balance-sheet data and information on bankruptcy to study the relationship between investment, financial constraints, and bankruptcy in a posttransition country. Our data constitute a dynamic panel and cover the period 2006–2011, which also allows us to study the impact of the 2008 crisis on Czech companies. Using investment–cash flow sensitivity to analyze financial constraints we find there is robust evidence that cash flow and the level of debt have a positive and significant impact on the investment rate. By taking a closer look at individual subsamples we reveal that the existence of financial constraints, proxied by investment–cash flow sensitivity, is evident mainly after 2008 and in small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, we do not uncover any evidence that firms going bankrupt during our observed period faced more severe financial constraints. Moreover, companies going bankrupt had significantly higher levels of external debt and bank loans, which indicates that they may have been, in fact, less constrained than others.

We explore how pricing dynamics in the European airline industry vary with the competitive environment. Our results highlight substantial variations in pricing dynamics that are consistent with a theory of intertemporal price discrimination. First, the rate at which prices increase towards the scheduled travel date is decreasing in competition, supporting the idea that competition restrains the ability of airlines to price-discriminate. Second, the sensitivity to competition is substantially increasing in the heterogeneity of the customer base, reflecting further that restraints on price discrimination are only relevant if there is initial scope for price discrimination. These patterns are quantitatively important, explaining about 83 percent of the total within-flight price dispersion, and explaining 17 percent of the observed cross-market variation of pricing dynamics.

This discussion paper led to a publication in Journal of Economics and Management Strategy Employees' incentive to invest in their task proficiency depends on the likelihood that they will execute the same tasks in the future. Changes in tasks can be warranted as a result of technological progress and changes in firm strategy as well as from fine-tuning job design and from monitoring individuals' performance. However, the possibility of a change in tasks reduces employees' incentive to invest in task-specific skills. We develop a simple two-period principal-agent model showing that some degree of inertia benefits the principal. We then analyze how organizations can optimally combine several policies to approach the optimal degree of inertia. In particular, we consider the optimal mixture of (abstaining from) exploration, managerial vision, organizational task-specific investments, and incentive pay. Our analysis yields testable predictions concerning the relations between these organizational policies.