Ambiguity is pervasive in many environments and is increasingly being introduced into economic and financial models. This paper characterises ambiguity in the form of newly defined Choquet random walks: discrete-time binomial trees with capacities instead of exact probabilities on their...

This paper studies the impact of business cycles on firms' strategic investment decisions by developing and solving a continuous time regime-dependent real options game in an asymmetric duopoly. The value functions, roles and optimal investment timing decisions of the two firms in the expansion...

This paper studies the effect of managerial compensation terms on the well-known “underinvestment” incentive. We extend the Mauer and Ott (2000) real-option model of corporate expansion, and show that, when the manager maximizes the value of his compensation package (rather than equity...

This paper examines the effect of progressive taxation on a firm's investment intensity and timing decisions using a real options approach. The firm possesses a perpetual option to invest in a project at any instant by incurring an irreversible investment cost at that time. The amount of the...

This paper analyses the presence of financial constraint in the investment decisions of 367 Brazilian firms from 1997 to 2004, using a Bayesian econometric model with group-varying parameters. The motivation for this paper is the use of clustering techniques to group firms in a totally...

We consider a classical heavy tailed risk model, included in a regulation mechanism. The regulator exercises a minimal cash requirement level and penalties for violating it to regulate the insurance firm. The problem of the insurance firm is to establish an investment and risk exposure policy as...

This paper examines the effect of irreversibility on investment under mean reversion. We develop a continuous-time model wherein a risk-neutral firm is endowed with a perpetual option to invest in a project at any time by incurring a fixed investment cost at that instant. The project, once...

This paper introduces monopolistic competition into two-sector general equilibrium models to investigate the impacts of international factor mobility on the skilled–unskilled wage inequality. The basic model shows that the change of skilled–unskilled wage inequality is determined by the...

Achieving sustained high rates of economic growth in Pacific countries has proved incredibly challenging. Despite many being rich in natural resources, receiving high levels of foreign aid and being open to external trade, the economic growth rates of Pacific Island countries are the lowest and...

In this paper we study the long-run determinants of current account balances in 21 OECD countries. We define long-run targets to determine whether actual current account balances are in line with their equilibrium values and find that, following the crisis, the United States, Japan and Spain...