probability of disaster leads to a collapse of investment and a recession, an increase in risk spreads, and a decrease in the … shocks to aggregate uncertainty, I introduce a small, time-varying risk of economic disaster in a standard real business … risk of disaster does not affect the path of macroeconomic aggregates - a "separation theorem" between macroeconomic …

consumption, portfolio allocation, financing, investment, and business exit decisions. The optimal capital structure is determined …. More risk-averse entrepreneurs default earlier, but also choose higher leverage, even though leverage makes his equity more … risky. Non-diversified entrepreneurs demand both systematic and idiosyncratic risk premium. Cash-out option and external …

investment. Uncertainty increases real option values making firms more cautious when investing or disinvesting. This is confirmed … both numerically for a model with a rich mix of adjustment costs, time-varying uncertainty, and aggregation over investment … investment response to demand shocks. This implies the responsiveness of firms to any given policy stimulus may be much lower in …

We re-examine the basic investment problem of deciding when to incur a sunk cost to obtain a stochastically fluctuating … benefit. The optimal investment rule satisfies a trade-off between a larger versus a later net benefit; we show that this … demand curve. We reinterpret the optimal investment rule as a markup formula involving an elasticity that has exactly the …

This study uncovers a statistically significant negative correlation between volatility and private investment over the … number of different measures, volatility reduces private investment in developing countries. We then show that the … continue to hold even if the coefficient of relative risk aversion approaches zero (that is, even if the marginal utility of …

The theoretical relationship between investment and uncertainty is ambiguous. This paper briefly surveys the insights … theoretical effects. Our results from a panel of U.S. manufacturing firms indicate a negative effect of uncertainty on investment … consistent with theories of irreversible investment. We find no evidence for a positive effect via the channel of the convexity …

This paper derives closed-form solutions for the investment and market value, under uncertainty, of competitive firms … irreversible investment as well as for reversible investment. Optimal investment is a non-decreasing function of q, the shadow … value of capital. The conditions of optimality imply that q cannot contain a bubble; thus, optimal investment depends only …

A recent literature suggests that because investment expenditures are irreversible and can be delayed, they may be … aggregate investment. We find that the volatility of the marginal profitability of capital - a summary measure of uncertainty … - affects investment as the theory suggests, but the size of the effect is moderate, and is greatest for developing countries …

I study irreversible investment decisions when projects take time to complete, and are subject to two types of …, and materials that will ultimately be required to complete the project, and that is only resolved as the investment … required, and which is external to the firm's investment activity. I derive a simple decision rule that maximizes the firm …

We study the effects of aggregate and idiosyncratic uncertainty on the entry of firms, total investment, and prices in … a competitive industry with irreversible investment. We first use standard dynamic programming methods to determine …