Real Investment, Capital Intensity and Interest Rates

Real Interest Rates, Saving and Investment

This paper investigates the determinants of real interest rates at world and country level. The starting point is the idea that real interest rates re°ect the interaction of desired saving and planned investment, using the framework developed by Barro and Sala-i-Martin (1990) and Barro (1992). The paper updates previous results and extends the analysis to study long real interest rates. We anal...

World Real Interest Rates: A Global Savings and Investment Perspective

Investment , Tobin ’ s q , and Interest Rates ∗

To study the impact of stochastic interest rates and capital illiquidity on investment and firm value, we incorporate a widely-used arbitrage-free term structure model of interest rates into a standard q-theoretic framework. Our generalized q model informs us to use corporate credit-risk information to predict investments when empirical measurement issues of Tobin’s average q are significant (e...

Interest Rates, Irreversibility, and Backward-Bending Investment

This paper studies the effect of interest rates on investment in an environment where firms make irreversible investments with uncertain pay-offs. In this setting, changes in the interest rate affect both the cost of capital and the cost of delaying investment to acquire information. These two forces combine to generate an aggregate investment demand curve that is a backward-bending function of...

Inventory Investment and the Real Interest Rate

The relationship between inventory investment and the real interest rate has been difficult to assess empirically. Recent work has proposed a linear-quadratic inventory model with time-varying discount factor to identify the effects of real interest rate on inventory investment. The authors show that this framework does not separately identify the effects of real interest rate on inventory inve...