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...

Recently the 3D structure of the Osaka mutant form (E22Δ) of Amyloid-β1-40 has been determined. We here compare the NMR chemical-shift with the published shifts of a brain-seeded form of wild-type Aβ and suggest that the determined mutant fold is accessible to the wild-type protein as well, with small conformational adaptations which accommodate the E22 residue missing in the Osaka mutant. In a...

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...

We incorporate long-term defaultable corporate bonds and credit risk in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium business cycle model. Credit risk amplifies aggregate technology shocks. The debt-capital ratio is a new state variable and its endogenous movements provide a propagation mechanism. The model can match the persistence and volatility of output growth as well as the mean equity premium...