This paper studies the choice between investment in new and used capital. We argue that used capital inherently relaxes credit constraints and thus firms which are more credit constrained invest more in used capital. Used capital is cheap relative to new capital in terms of its purchase price...

This paper studies the role of leasing of productive assets. When capital is leased (or rented), it is more easily repossessed and hence leasing has higher debt capacity and relaxes financing constraints. However, leasing gives rise to an agency problem with regard to the care with which the...

The paper has two objectives. The first is to construct a dynamic model of research joint ventures (RJVs) in which firms competing in the product market cooperate in investing to improve generic manufacturing technology. The second objective is to analyze cooperative research led by SEMATECH in...

We study adoption of a costly new technology when the profitability of the new technique differs over individuals and there is uncertainty about these individual-specific differences. We establish that such individual-specific uncertainty results in a financing constraint when debt contracts are...

We study the behavior of firms in an imperfectly competitive environment in which firms influence the evolution of the stock of capital equipment. Our model enables us, using analytical characterizations, to show the effect of key ingredients of dynamic competition on firm strategies and...

I construct a heterogeneous agents economy that mimics the time-series behavior of the US earnings distribution from 1963 to 2003. Agents face aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks and accumulate real and financial assets. I estimate the shocks driving the model using data on income inequality, on...