Identifying the impacts of liquidity shocks on spending decisions is difficult methodologically but important for theory, practice, and policy. Using seven different methods on microenterprise loan applicants, we find striking results. Borrowers report uses of loan proceeds strategically, and...

The investment decisions of small-scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment. Binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can reduce investment in activities with high expected profits. We conducted several experiments in northern Ghana in...

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) develop their networks of foreign affiliates gradually over time. Instead of exploring all profitable opportunities immediately, they first establish themselves in their home countries and then enter new markets stepwise. We argue that this behavior is driven by...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the Spanish economy, over the period 1977-97, on whether monetary policy shocks have had different effects on real output growth depending on the state of the business cycle. To do so, we adopt an extension of Hamilton's (1989) Markov Switching...

This Paper investigates the empirical relationship between uncertainty and investment dynamics. This is motivated by the real options literature, which suggests a weaker response of investment to demand shocks at higher levels of uncertainty, as firms place a greater value on the option to wait....

Over recent years `opportunity cost' (OC) models of growth have been constructed which suggest that firms take advantage of the possibility of intertemporal subsitution in order to engage in productivity-improving activities during recessions. This paper tests whether this argument is correct,...

This article develops a multi-period production model to examine the optimal dynamic behaviour of a large monopolistic value-maximizing firm that manipulates its valuation as well as the price of its output. In the pre-commitment equilibrium the firm’s output and labour demand are decreased,...

In this paper we present estimates of inventory models based on firm level panel data and investigate whether an over-simplified specification of the production technology may account for the failure to find technological incentives to smooth production in the context of the standard...

We consider the decision of an agent with time inconsistent preferences to undertake an irreversible investment that yields an uncertain current benefit and a delayed cost. We show that, if the flow of information revealed between periods when the investment is postponed is sufficiently high,...

This Paper studies the impact of wage growth on the evolution of employment in an intertemporal general-equilibrium model with endogenous productivity growth. For real wage growth above laissez-faire levels, we obtain steady-state equilibria in which productivity grows at the same rate as wages,...