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...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the phenomenon of capital flight from developing countries received considerable attention in the economics literature. Capital flight destroys the domestic macroeconomic environment and decreases transparency and accountability. It restricts financial resources when a country is looking for economic growth and development. The purpose of this article is to measure t...

In this paper we use panel data on …rms from Brazil and China to investigate the role of …nancial constraints for borrowing and investment. We develop a structural investment model, in which borrowing is costly but sometimes necessary to …nance investment. Structural parameters are estimated by matching simulated model moments to empirical data, using a simulated minimum distance estimator. The...

General purpose technologies (GPTs) like AI enable and require significant complementary investments. These investments are often intangible poorly measured in national accounts. We develop a model that shows how this can lead to underestimation of productivity growth new GPTs early years and, later, when the benefits harvested, overestimation. call phenomenon Productivity J-curve. apply our me...

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 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...

We propose to use the attractiveness of pooling relatively short time series that display similar dynamics, but without restricting to pooling all into one group. We suggest to estimate the appropriate grouping of time series simultaneously along with the group-specific model parameters. We cast estimation into the Bayesian framework and use Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods. We discu...

Job Durations with Worker and Firm Specific Effects: MCMC Estimation with Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data We study job durations using a multivariate hazard model allowing for worker-specific and firm-specific unobserved determinants. The latter are captured by unobserved heterogeneity terms or random effects, one at the firm level and another at the worker level. This enables us to decompo...