Recent studies have shown that the dynamics of firms (growth, job reallocation, and exit) are negatively correlated with the initial size of the firm and its age. In this paper we analyze whether financial factors, in addition to technological differences, are important in generating these...

When a production process requires two extremely complementary inputs, conventional wisdom holds that a firm would always upgrade them simultaneously. We show, however, that if upgrading each input involves a fixed cost, the firm may upgrade them at different dates, "asynchronously." This...

Using European data, this paper finds that (i) industry entry and exit rates are positively related to industry rates of investment-specific technical change (ISTC); and (ii) the sensitivity of industry entry and exit rates to cross-country differences in entry costs depends on industry rates of...

To address how technological progress in financial intermediation affects the economy, a costly-state verification framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel ingredients. First, firms differ in the risk/return combinations that they offer. Second, the...

Several impatient investors with private costs <em>C_i</em> face an indivisible irreversible investment opportunity whose value <em>V</em> is governed by geometric Brownian motion. The first investor <em>i</em> to seize the opportunity receives the entire payoff, <em>V-C_i</em>. We characterize the symmetric Bayesian Nash...

This paper explores the nature of fluctuations in world bulk shipping by quantifying the impact of time to build and demand uncertainty on investment and prices. We examine the impact of both construction lags and their lengthening in periods of high investment activity, by constructing a...

Many subjects in lab experiments exhibit small-stakes risk aversion, consistent with loss aversion. Those with greater math skills are less likely to show small-stakes risk aversion. We argue that departures from expected utility maximization may help explain why many firms in developing...