Inventory fluctuations are an important phenomenon in business cycles. However, the preliminary data on inventory investment as published in the German national accounts are tremendously prone to revision and therefore ill-equipped to diagnose the current stance of the inventory cycle. The Ifo business survey contains information on the assessments of inventory stocks in manufacturing as well a...

This paper studies the effect of terrorist attacks on the internal structure of cities. We develop an urban framework with capital structures suitable for the study of this question and analyze the long and short term implications of this type of events. In the long run, the analysis shows that a terrorist attack will affect urban structure only modestly, relative to the potentially large decre...

This paper makes three main points. Fiscal policy, …rst, may be needed in the long run to maintain full employment and avoid secular stagnation. If …scal policy is used in this way, second, the long-run debt ratio depends (i) inversely on the rate of growth, (ii) inversely on government consumption, and (iii) directly on the degree of inequality. The analysis, third, suggests that policies and ...

Resource misallocation lowers aggregate productive effi ciency. The existing literature often infers the magnitude of misallocation from the dispersion of average revenue products. However, the methodology is subject to several identification issues. In particular, the estimator would be upward biased by the presence of unobserved heterogeneities in output and demand elasticities; adjustment co...

Neurons being generated in the striatum of 10 fetal cats were pulse labeled by injection of [3H]thymidine directly into the maternal uterus at times ranging between the 22nd and 30th days (E22-E30) of the 65-day gestational period. Many of the striatal neurons labeled during this interval were found, at adolescence, to form 100- to 600-mum-wide cell clusters in the caudate nucleus. In E24-E30 s...

The author empirically tests two aspects of the interaction between financial variables and inventory investment: negative cash flow and finance constraints due to asymmetric information. This is one of the first studies of inventory investment and finance constraints using Canadian data. A sample of Canadian manufacturing firms over the period 1992Q2–1999Q4 is split into subsamples based on ag...

China has been considered as such a successful example of enhancing economic growth by massive infrastructure investments in the past decades. A recent paper by Shi and Huang (2014) indicates a very big positive return of public infrastructure in China during 1995-2011 using China’s provincial-level data. However, the literature has provided con‡icting empirical results on the productivity e¤ec...

The models Feldstein and Rothschild, on the hand, and Jorgenson on the other adopted in 1974 to highlight the replacement ratio are identical. Yet, the authors reached opposite conclusions and that view prevailed, which is weaker in terms of theoretical and empirical foundations. This paper argues that both puzzles may be resolved by reference to the differences in the methodological preconcept...

The productivity e¤ect of public infrastructure investment is controversial in the traditional literature using aggregate production function estimation, mainly due to reverse causality. This paper develops a new approach, using a model of endogenous productivity in a …rm-level production function, and matching Chinese …rm-level production data with province-level infrastructure data. The estim...

In this paper we examine an optimal investment policy of the firm that is financed by issuing equity and debt. Recently, a number of researchers have studied the interaction among firm’s investment and financing decisions under uncertainty by means of real option framework. In the literature, investment problems for a firm with growth options, that is financed with equity and debt are investiga...