This paper studies the role of stabilization policy in a model where …rm entry responds to shocks and uncertainty. We evaluate stabilization policy in the context of a simple analytically solvable sticky price model, where …rms have to prepay a …xed cost of entry. The presence of endogenous entry can alter the dynamic response to shocks, leading to greater persistence in the e¤ects of monetary ...

Real interest and inflation rates have been very low in many industrialized countries since the Great Recession. In this paper, a mechanism of low and floating real interest and inflation rates is examined based on the concept a “Nash equilibrium of a Pareto inefficient path” and the law of motion for trend inflation. I show that, because the link between the marginal product of capital and the...

A strong private equity market is a cornerstone for commercialization and innovation in modern economies. However, substantial differences exist in the relative amounts raised and invested in private equity across European countries. We investigate the macro-determinants of private equity investment in Europe, focusing on the comparison between CEE and Western European countries. Our estimation...

Emerging markets exhibit (1) high expected returns to capital and (2) large exposures to movements in US returns, measured by the ‘beta’ of the returns to the asset on the returns to its US counterpart. We document these facts in detail for two asset classes stock market returns and the return to aggregate capital and we provide further evidence from a third class sovereign bonds. We use a seri...

This paper studies a simple dynamic investment decision problem of a firm where adjustment costs have capital size effects. This type of setting possibly results in multiple steady states thresholds and a discontinuous policy function. We study the global dynamic properties of the model by employing the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman method and dynamic programming that help us in the numerical detecti...

Labor hoarding is a widely believed empirical behavior of …rms and a prominent explanation for procyclical labor productivity. Conventional wisdom attributes labor hoarding to labor adjustment costs. This paper argues that the conventional wisdom is inadequate for understanding labor hoarding because it ignores the role of inventories. Since idle labor can be used to produce inventories, why do...

This paper demonstrates endogenous fluctuations of aggregate investments when firm-level investments follow an (S,s) policy and exhibits demand externality. We present a method to characterize the aggregate fluctuations that arise from the interaction of the (S,s) policies. We show that the growth rate of capital has a strictly positive variance even when the number of firms tends to infinity i...

A recent literature suggests that because investment expenditures are irreversible and can be delayed, they may be highly sensitive to uncertainty. We briefly summarize the theory, stressing its empirical implications. We then use cross-section and time-series data for a set of developing and industrialized countries to explore the relevance of the theory for aggregate investment. We find that ...

Empirical evidence documents a tight link between aggregate and firm-level investment and corporate credit spreads. Moreover, it has been shown that credit spreads largely reflect a compensation for bearing macroeconoimc risks. We use a tractable model with recursive preferences and time varying macroeoconomic risk to investigate the link between aggregate risk and corporate policies in a produ...

This paper explores the institutional factors behind the crisis of capital accumulation in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of its focus on institutional stability, the paper contributes to the literature on the existence of an apartheid social structure of accumulation in which economic and political institutions are important determinants of investment. Investment function estimat...