This paper studies R&D investment decisions of a firm facing the threat of new technology entry and subject to technical uncertainty. We distinguish four scenarios: inevitable entry, entry deterrence, entry blockade, and non-credible entry threat. The entry threat stimulates the incumbent to...

Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information threatens this benefit. Despite these threats,...

Using firm and industry data, we establish two facts: (i) Uncertainty about demand conditions not only reduces export sales and exporting probabilities but also makes exports less sensitive to trade policy; (ii) the most productive exporters are more affected by higher industry-wide expenditure...

Guaranteed renewability is a prominent feature in many health and life insurance markets. It is well established in the literature that, when there is (only) risk type uncertainty, the optimal GR contract with renewal price set at the actuarially fair price for low risk types provides full...

Uncertainty about the level of demand is thought to influence irreversible capacity decisions. This paper examines some implications of the theory literature on this topic in an empirical study of the US cement industry between 1994 and 2006. Firms in this sector have the ability to deliver...

The paper shows that taking inventory control out of the hands of competitive or exclusive retailers and assigning it to a manufacturer increases the value of a supply chain especially for goods whose demand is highly volatile. This is because doing so solves incentive distortions that arise...

Employing a continuous-time real options modeling framework, this paper scrutinizes the incentives to invest in German offshore wind farms. The focus of the analysis is the mode of action of the German feed-in tariff system for offshore wind energy deployment. The numerical results reveal that...

The growing dissatisfaction with perceived distributional inequality and budgetary constraints gave rise to a discussion on the (re-)introduction of wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are typically levied on private wealth, in some countries also on corporate wealth. To avoid misleading statements...

Little is known theoretically, and even less empirically, about the relationship between firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within firms. We develop a model in which firms choose which suppliers to integrate and whether to delegate decisions to integrated suppliers. We test...

In a continuous-time framework we study the technology and investment choice problem of a continuous co-digestion biogas plant dealing with randomly fluctuating relative convenience of input factor costs. Input factors enter into the productive process together mixed according to a given initial...