This paper studies how frictions, both real and financial, interact with capital tax policy in a dynamic, general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. Comparative statics show that tax policy can have substantially different effects depending upon the frictions present. Analytical and numerical exercises show that accounting for firm heterogeneity is important when evaluating the respons...

This paper provides a micro-level evidence that ...nancial development impacts growth by reducing ...nancing constraints that would otherwise restrict e¢cient ...rm investment. I estimate a structural model based on the Euler equation for investment using ...rm-level data from 40 countries. I ...nd a strong negative relationship between the extent of ...nancial market development, and the sensi...

We consider energy investment, when a choice has to be made between fossil fuel and biomass fired production technologies. A dynamic model is presented to illustrate the effect of the different degrees of input price uncertainty on the choice of technology and the timing of the investment. It is shown that when the choice of technology is irreversible, it may be optimal to postpone the investme...

We examine how local political corruption affects firm innovation in the United States. We find that firms located in more corrupt districts are less innovative, as measured by their patenting activities. We identify two possible economic channels through which corruption may affect innovation: a disincentive effect and a culture effect. We show that the negative impact of corruption on innovat...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the interaction between hedging, financing, and investment decisions. This work is relevant in that theoretical predictions are not necessarily identical to those in the case where only two decisions are being made. We argue that the way in which hedging affects the firms’ financing and investing decisions differs for firms with different ...

We explain how to optimize portfolios of bonds and stocks with respect to the Expected Shortfall (ES), respectively RORC or RORAC based on ES. In a pragmatic approach we combine and correlate a stock market model with geometric brownian motions with a two-factor Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR-2) model for the interest rates/bonds. We use recent results from the theory of risk capital allocation, perfo...

In the recent recession and current economic recovery, policymakers have supported housing prices, expecting that improvement in the balance sheets of banks and consumers will spur economic activity. Considering the period of 1988 through 2006, we document that banks which are active in strong housing markets increase mortgage lending and decrease commercial lending. Firms that borrow from thes...

This paper analyzes how property rights affect the allocation of firms’ available resources among different types of assets. In particular, we investigate empirically for a large number of countries whether firms in environments with more secure property rights allocate available resources more towards intangible assets and consequentially grow faster. We find that improved asset allocation due...

Existing literature focuses on how corporate taxation affects firms’ investment decisions by altering after-tax returns. This paper instead examines how corporate taxation affects investment by reducing the cash flow a firm has available to invest in the current period. I use a sharp nonlinearity in the mapping from pre-tax profitability to taxes created by the tax loss carryforward feature of ...

This article shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. Competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage strengthens investors’ bargaining positions. And yet, entrepreneurs’ incentives may be improved, because projects funded by investors with ‘‘shallow pockets’’ must have no...