Information technology (m infrastructure investments are a major component of firm investment in information technology. Becausethese investlnents are frequentlymade in anticipation of business developments, their subsequent benefits can be difficult to track andquantify(Grossman and Packer 1989). Infrastructure investments are often viewed only from a cost perspective, as any gains com...

Existing studies show that firm asset and investment growth predict cross-sectional stock returns. Firms that shrink their assets or investments subsequently earn higher returns than firms that expand their assets or investments. I show that the superior returns of the low asset and investment growth portfolios are due to the omission of delisting returns in CRSP monthly stock return file and t...

We report on a set of 40 semi-structured interviews with information security executives and managers at a variety of firms and government agencies. The purpose of the interviews was to learn more about how organizations make cybersecurity investment decisions: how much support they receive to execute their mission, how they prioritize which threats to defend against, and how they choose betwee...

We investigate the investment-cash flow sensitivity of a large sample of the UK listed firms and confirm that investment is strongly cash flow-sensitive. Is this suboptimal investment policy the result of agency problems when managers with high discretion overinvest, or of asymmetric information when managers owning equity are underinvesting if the market (erroneously) demands too high a risk p...

We estimate the causal effect of temporary tax incentives on equipment investment using a difference-in-differences design and policy shifts in accelerated depreciation. Analyzing data for over 120,000 US firms from 1993 to 2010, we present three findings. First, bonus depreciation raised investment by 17.3 percent on average between 2001 and 2004 and 29.5 percent between 2008 and 2010. Second,...

This paper analyzes gender differences in the investment activity of German small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The empirical analysis is carried out on a sample of firms drawn from the KfW Mittelstandspanel, a representative survey of German SMEs for the period from 2003 to 2009. We find evidence that female-owned firms are less likely to invest and if they invest, then their average in...

This paper examines how foreign ownership affects the investment decisions of subsidiary firms using a new dataset of listed-parent − listed-subsidiary pairs. We find that improvements in the investment opportunities of parent firms have a negative effect on the investment of their subsidiaries, after controlling for the investment opportunities of the subsidiary, which can be independently obs...

While private equity (PE) is expanding rapidly in developing countries, there is little academic research on this subject. In this paper I exploit two new data sources and employ two distinct empirical strategies to identify the impact of PE on Indian firms. I compare the investments made by one of India’s largest PE firms to the investments that just missed (deals that made it to the final rou...

a r t i c l e i n f o Tacit knowledge affects the trade-off between entrepreneurship and technology transfer. I present a formal model in which an inventor and the existing firm engage in a strategic innovation game by choosing whether to compete or to cooperate through technology transfer. The model highlights how the problem of tacit knowledge affects the inventor's R&D investment and the exi...

Since the work of George Richardson on the problem of investment co-ordination, the literature has focused on explaining equilibrium in investment games and neglected the problem of how investments are co-ordinated. This paper reports the findings of a case study of the brick industry which used grounded theory techniques to develop a new analysis of investment coordination. Our main findings i...