The paper analyses the timing of spontaneous environmental innovation when second-mover advantages, arising from the expectation of declining investment costs, increase the option value of waiting created by investment irreversibility and uncertainty about private payoffs. We then focus on the design of public subsidies aimed at bridging the gap between the spontaneous time of technological cha...

By considering the demand and supply effects of defense investment and the uncertainty of the stochastic process of the production and defense investment, this study proposes a stochastic endogenous growth model to explore the impact of defense investment on economic growth. The results suggest that the relationship between defense investment and economic growth rate is nonlinear and obtains th...

The Congressional Budget Office’s analyses of the long-term effects of changes in federal fiscal policy include the effects of changes in federal budget deficits on aggregate output and income. Those effects depend on the responses of private saving and net inflows of foreign capital to changes in deficits. This paper reviews empirical estimates of those two effects and explains how changes in ...

Firms with private information about the outcomes of production under uncertainty may face capital (liquidity) constraints that prevent them from attaining efficient levels of investment in a world with costly and/or imperfect monitoring. As an alternative, we examine the efficiency of a simple pooling scheme designed to provide a public (cooperative) supply of liquidity that results in the fir...

This paper analyzes how pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) investment responds to publicly supported biomedical research performed mainly at universities and nonprofit institutions. New microlevel data on investment, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, allow measures of public basic and clinical research in seven medical classes to be included in a distributed lag model explai...