The price sensitivity of business investment spending is a central element in economic analysis. A substantial response of capital spending to its user cost, which combines interest, tax, and depreciation rates with relative prices, is critical to evaluating the effectiveness of monetary policy,...

Congress currently is considering changes in the capital gains tax, including reducing the rate, indexing the rate to inflation, or some combination of reduction and indexing. These changes have been advocated on the grounds that a cut in the rate will stimulate investment and economic growth....

A well-known but under-emphasized feature of the business cycle is that the flow of internal finance is highly procyclical. We argue that finance constraints lead firms to offset a large proportion of internal finance fluctuations through inventory (dis)investment. We construct three panels of...

Over the last decade, research has shown that financing constraints have an important impact on many aspects of firm behavior and aggregate fluctuations. This paper undertakes a critical comparison of the three main financing constraint hypotheses- -the bank lending, collateral, and internal...

We analyze the microfoundations for Keynesian aggregate demand effects by considering the link between aggregate demand and firm production decisions under monopolistic competition. Macroeconomic equilibrium is characterized in a simple graphical framework that facilitates comparison of several...

Hyman Minsky's research emphasized the central role of finance in modern economies at a time when finance was not important in most mainstream macroeconomic research. But in the 1980s, mainstream research began to explore the role of finance in firm and consumer behavior. This paper examines the...