Three funds are necessary to manage an oil windfall: intergenerational, liquidity and investment funds. The optimal liquidity fund is bigger if the windfall lasts longer and oil price volatility, prudence and the GDP share of oil rents are high and productivity growth is low. We apply our theory...

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....

This Paper re-examines the impact of capital income taxes on the incentive to invest in the presence of risk. Specifically, it challenges a well-known claim in the literature that such a tax can leave incentives ‘basically unaffected’ because the tax liability is offset by a reduction in the...

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,...

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...

This Paper asks whether the asset pricing fluctuations induced by the presence of costly external finance are empirically plausible. To accomplish this, we incorporate costly external finance into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model and explore its implications for the properties of...

The objective of this note is to document the importance of improvements relative to the other forms of capital spending and to determine whether improvements have similar cyclical properties as maintenance and repair. To shed some light on these issues, we look at a unique data set on Swiss...

In this article, we demonstrate that a small degree of stochastic variation in the depreciation rate of capital can greatly reduce the comovement between hours worked and labour productivity in a neoclassical growth model. The depreciation rate is modeled as a Markov process to place a strict...

This Paper shows how microeconomic data on investment plans can be used to study the structure of risk faced by firms. Revisions of investment plans form a martingale, and thus reveal the underlying shocks driving investment. We decompose revisions in investment plans into micro, sector and...