We explore the impact of investment-specific technology (IST) shocks on the crosssection of stock returns. IST shocks reflect technological advances embodied in new capital goods. Using a structural model, we show that IST shocks have a differential effect on the two fundamental components of firm value, the value of assets in place and the value of growth opportunities. This differential sensi...

The world is continually changing: the emergence of new technology and new demands for pertinent information pose new challenges and possibilities for forest management. Are forest growth models keeping up with client needs? To remain relevant, modelers need to anticipate client needs, gauge the data needed to satisfy these demands, develop the tools to collect and analyze these data efficientl...

The 20 century offered opportunities for rapid natural resource-based growth that Latin America systematically missed. Even if it were the case that resource abundant countries have experienced relatively slow growth, the more interesting question is why some -Australia, and Sweden for example -successfully and rapidly developed while others did not. Latin America’s underperformance, and its pa...

As providers struggle to identify mechanisms to serve the Medicare population, the Medicare program continues to evolve. Of course, providers may serve the beneficiaries through traditional Medicare, Medicare HMOs, or a Medicare Select product, but as this book shows, under the appropriate conditions, the best way may be through the formation of a PSO.

We propose an exogenous measure of a country’s growth opportunities by interacting the country’s local industry mix with global price to earnings (PE) ratios. First, we find that these exogenous growth opportunities strongly predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This relation is strongest in countries that have liberalized their capital accounts, equit...

Modern agriculture faces challenges, such as loss of soil fertility, fluctuating climatic factors and increasing pathogen and pest attacks. Sustainability and environmental safety of agricultural production relies on eco-friendly approaches like biofertilizers, biopesticides and crop residue return. The multiplicity of beneficial effects of microbial inoculants, particularly plant growth promot...

We show that Tobin's q, as proxied by the ratio of the firm's market value to its book value, increases with the firm's systematic equity risk and falls with the firm's unsystematic equity risk. Further, an increase in the firm's total equity risk is associated with a fall in q. The negative relation between the change in total risk and the change in q is robust through time for the whole sampl...

This study examines the impacts of debt financing on the firms’ investment decisions by employing the method of the multiple linear regression on the data from 2006-2008 of 60 Chinese real estate listed companies. We obtain three major findings. First, there is a negative relation between debt financing and investment behavior in both firms with low-growth opportunities and high-growth opportun...