We examine investment behavior when firms face costs in the access to external funds. We find that despite the existence of liquidity constraints, standard investment regressions predict that cash flow is an important determinant of investment only if one ignores q. Conversely, we also obtain significant cash flow effects even in the absence of financial frictions. These findings provide suppor...

Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay that need to be collateralized, resulting in a financing versus risk management trade-off. We study this trade-off in a dynamic model of commodity price risk management and show that risk management is limited and that more financially constrained firms hedge less or not at all. We show that these predictions are consistent with the evi...

Recent work in the real options approach to investment has argued that firms face significant opportunity costs when entry costs are largely irreversible, and these costs equal the value of an option to defer investment. This study seeks to examine empirically these claims by investigating the interactive effects of uncertainty and irreversibility on the likelihood of entry into new business by...

Emerging markets exhibit high returns to capital, the ‘Lucas Paradox,’ alongside volatile growth rate regimes. We investigate the role of long-run risks, i.e., risk due to fluctuations in economic growth rates, in leading to return differentials across countries. We take the perspective of a US investor and outline an empirical strategy to identify risky growth shocks and quantify their implica...

We construct an arti cial neural network to act as a system of leading indicators. We focus on radial basis functions as the architecture and forward selection as the method for determining the number of basis functions in the network. A brief review is given of the advantages of this as a strategy. Using common heuristics to determine scaling, radii and centre population, we nd that the result...

This note derives the Golden Rule of capital accumulation in a Chakrabortytype economy, i.e. a two-period OLG economy where longevity is endogenous. It is shown that the capital per worker maximizing steady-state consumption per head is inferior to the Golden Rule capital level prevailing under exogenous longevity. We characterize also the Lifetime Golden Rule, that is, the capital per worker m...

A standard assumption of structural models of default is that firms assets evolve exogenously. In this paper, we document the importance of accounting for investment options in models of credit risk. In the presence of financing and investment frictions, firm-level variables which proxy for asset composition carry explanatory power for credit spreads beyond leverage. As a result, cross-sectiona...

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of attention recently, yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment—recognizing that investment may be a poo...