We analyze private fixed investment in the U.S. over the past 30 years. We show that investment is weak relative to … two broad categories of explanations: theories that predict low investment because of low Q, and theories that predict low … investment despite high Q. We argue that the data does not support the first category, and we focus on the second one. We use …

We examine how credit constraints affect the cyclical behavior of productivity-enhancing investment and thereby … volatility and growth. We first develop a simple growth model where firms engage in two types of investment: a short-term one and … a long-term productivity-enhancing one. Because it takes longer to complete, long-term investment has a relatively less …

We document a new business cycle fact: the cross-sectional standard deviation of firm-level investment (investment … dispersion) is robustly and significantly procyclical. This makes investment dispersion different from the dispersion of … productivity and output growth, which is countercyclical. Investment dispersion is more procyclical in the goods-producing sectors …

This paper presents closed-form solutions for the investment and valuation of a competitive firm with a Cobb … distribution of future price increases investment. An increase in the scale of the random component of a price can increase …, decrease or not affect the rate of investment depending on the sign of the covariance of this price with a weighted average of …

's q theory of investment. As Tobin has explained, aggregate investment can be expected to depend in a stable way on q, the … return on physical capital raise its market value and cause increased investment until equilibrium is restored. Although … models linking the stock market to investment have been estimated, they have not previously been used to examine the impact …

In this paper I analyze the relationships among investment, q, and cash flow in a tractable stochastic model in which … regressions of investment on q and cash flow. In empirical studies, the estimated cash-flow coefficient is generally positive and …

The Q-theory of investment says that a firm's investment rate should rise with its Q. We argue here that this theory … also explains why some firms buy other firms. We find that 1. A firm's merger and acquisition (Mamp;A) investment responds … to its Q more -- by a factor of 2.6 -- than its direct investment does, probably because Mamp;A investment is a high …

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment … between q and investment, relative to the frictionless benchmark. We present a calibrated version of the model, which, due to … this effect, generates realistic correlations between investment, q, and cash flow …