In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a number of forecasting models of U.S. business fixed investment spending growth over the recent 1995:1-2004:2 out-of-sample period at multiple forecast horizons. The forecasting models are based on the conventional Accelerator, Neoclassical, Average Q, and Cash-Flow models of investment spending, as well as empirical models developed more recently ...

The present paper analyzes the role of non-convex adjustment costs to capital in a stylized two country model of real business cycles. In contrast to the closed economy case, we find fixed adjustment costs to have a significant influence on investment decisions for each of the countries just as for the aggregated world economy. Like convex costs, fixed adjustment costs substantially limit capit...

Cox & Leland (2000) use techniques from the field of stochastic control theory to show that in the particular case of a Brownian motion for the asset returns all risk averse decision makers with a fixed investment horizon prefer path-independent pay-offs over path-dependent ones. We will provide a novel and simple proof for the Cox & Leland result and we will extend it to general, not necessari...

We use Monte Carlo simulations and real data to assess the performance of methods dealing with measurement error in investment equations. Our experiments show that fixed effects, error heteroscedasticity, and data skewness severely affect the performance and reliability of methods found in the literature. Estimators that use higher-order moments return biased coefficients for (both) mismeasured...

The aim of this paper is to examine the concentration of wealth among the group of top wealth holders, defined as those with wealth in excess of a high cut off. The paper begins by considering the definition of this cut off, analogous to the definition of a poverty line at the other end of the distribution. It then considers what can be learned about the proportion classified as ‘rich’ and abou...

We begin the development of a theory of Banach spaces in the definable setting of o-minimal structures. We outline several results which develop the theory of compact embeddings for explicitly given function spaces. One aim is to explain the substantive underpinnings of an important observation used in the proof of the Reparameterization Theorem of Pila and Wilkie in [2]. We place this observat...

A major concern with tradable emission permits is that stochastic permit prices may reduce a firm’s incentive to invest in abatement capital or technologies relative to other policies such as a fixed emissions charge. However, under efficient permit trading, the permit price uncertainty is caused by abatement cost uncertainties which affect investment under both permit and charge policies. We d...

Capital expenditures by the top 100 firms make up more than 60% of aggregate investment by publicly traded firms and account for most of the variation in aggregate net fixed private nonresidential investment. Surprisingly, these firms have the highest investment-cash flow sensitivity in the economy, despite being the least financially constrained. Further, contrary to the trend among smaller fi...

a r t i c l e i n f o The existing literature on the relationship between property rights in land and agricultural investment in Africa has given results that are often confusing and contradictory. I make two clarifying contributions to this literature. First, I pull together existing studies and investigate whether the results they find have been affected by research methods or local contexts....