Legal challenges and transitions of political power cause the future of regulatory policies to be uncertain. In this article, I investigate how uncertainty about environmental policy a‚ects investment and emissions at coal-€red power plants. I exploit a legal challenge to the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) that created variation in the probability that individual plants would need to comply w...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants, grants of or opportunities to purchase r...

This paper uses SSBF data to better understand how the owners of small firms use decisions about legal organization, firm size, capital structure, and owner investment in the firm to manage firm risk. The main findings are: Firms with unlimited liability are smaller, both when measured by assets and number of employees, and tend to be less leveraged than those whose owners limit their personal ...

The relationship between technical progress and price competition is a controversial issue in economics. This paper highlights the fact that investment in technical progress is an authentic type of competition which benefits the consumers rather than the industry. This type of competition exists when the potential for technical progress, which can be incorporated by firms through investment, is...

Technological progress is typically a result of trial-and-error research by competing firms. While some research paths lead to the innovation sought, others result in dead ends. Because firms benefit from their competitors working in the wrong direction, they do not reveal their dead-end findings. Time and resources are wasted on projects that other firms have already found to be dead ends. Con...

Evaluating an industrial opportunity often means to engage in financial modelling 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 th...

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 th...

We consider a variety of vintage-capital models of a rm's choice of technology under uncertainty in the presence of adjustment costs and technology-speci c learning. Similar models have been studied in a deterministic setting. Part of our objective is to examine the robustness of the implications of the certainty models to uncertainty. Our analysis highlights the role of the speci cation of cos...

We examine the importance of asset pricing anomalies for the real economy. When firms interpret public information in the way it is reflected in market prices, informational inefficiencies manifesting in financial markets as anomalies can cause material real inefficiencies. We estimate the joint dynamic distribution of firm characteristics that have been linked to anomalies and other firm varia...

Relying upon a rich and unique panel of Hungarian firms over 7 years, from 1992 up to 1998, this paper estimates simultaneously TFP, Total Factor Productivity, identified as efficiency, and the parameters of a model where investment depends upon internal funds, wages, and sales, as in Prasnikar J. and Svejnar J. (2000). It shows that while real investment is higher in foreign firms, the improve...