This paper investigates the determinants of private investment in Senegal over the period of 1970-2000. It first tests the variables for unit root using two, relatively, new tests namely the Dickey-Fuller generalised least square de-trending test proposed by Elliot et al. (1996) and the Ng-Perron test following Ng and Perron (2001). The long run private investment equation is derived using the ...

The point of this paper is that if output is durable then optimal behavior of a supplier is characterized by production smoothing. Durability of goods (such as capital) has opposite effects on the supply of the goods. Higher durability on the one hand raises the variability of investment demand for the goods by lowering the user’s cost, which tends to raise the variability of supply; on the oth...

We study the connection between banking crises and non-life insurance consumption in 139 countries from 1988 to 2010. After controlling for output, we find a negative excess decline in non-life insurance consumption after the occurrence of a banking crisis only in countries heavily depending on bank credit. The primary contributing factor is motor insurance which loses 113% of the annual premiu...

We present an analytically tractable general equilibrium business cycle model that features micro-level investment lumpiness. We prove an exact irrelevance proposition which provides sufficient conditions on preferences, technology, and the fixed cost distribution such that any positive upper support of the fixed cost distribution yields identical equilibrium dynamics of the aggregate quantitie...

We study the implications of the creative destruction lifecycle of innovation for asset prices. We develop a general equilibrium model of endogenous firm creation and destruction where “incremental” innovations by incumbents and “radical” innovations by entrants drive the volatility of growth prospects of the economy. Higher entry—bigger threat of displacement of incumbents by entrants—implies ...

The study analyzes the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment (DI) on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1990–2003. The results show that DI is positive and significantly correlated with economic growth in both the OLS and fixed effects estimation, but FDI is positive and significant only in the OLS estimation. The study also found that FDI has an in...

This study tests for the presence of real options effects induced by uncertainty and (partial) irreversibility on fixed capital investment using Italian company data. Our approach recognizes that firm-level investment spending may, itself, be aggregated over multiple investment decisions in separate types of capital goods and emphasizes effects of uncertainty on short-run investment dynamics. U...

We examine inventory adjustment in the U.S. manufacturing sector using quarterly rmlevel data over the period 1978{97. Our evidence indicates that the inventory investment process is nonlinear and asymmetric, results consistent with a nonconvex adjustment cost structure. The inventory adjustment process di ers over the business cycle: for a given level of excess inventories, rms disinvest more ...

Although investment has played an important role in China’s phenomenal economic growth over the last two decades, there has been little research on investment determination at the macro level. This study sets out to explore and explain the factors that influence China’s aggregate investment measured by the fixed capital formation during the reform period and to draw useful conclusions from anal...