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 subject of the paper is the investigation of possible improvements to the process of eyeglass lenses production. The research area concerns the application of modern IT tools to the enhancement of production results, in the context of digitalization of the economy, including industry. The...

Unobserved plant level heterogeneity and discrete production processes can produce problems for estimation. A structural model of discrete production decisions by heterogeneous plants is constructed and, as a case study, estimated for the U.S. Portland cement industry. A new estimator is...

The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

We consider the estimation of Cobb-Douglas production functions using panel data covering a large sample of companies observed for a small number of time periods. Standard GMM estimators, which eliminate unobserved firm-specific e¤ects by taking first differences, have been found to produce...

I investigate how political uncertainty influences corporate investment decisions employing a unique panel dataset of German manufacturing firms. I use data on firms' self-reported investment realizations, plans and revisions. The firm-specific user cost of capital captures the current...

This paper argues that the production constraints in the basic NAIRU model should be distinguished by type: capital constraints and labour constraints. It notes the failure to incorporate this phenomenon in standard macro models. Using panel data for UK manufacturing over 80 quarters we show...

This paper argues that the production constraints in the basic NAIRU model should be distinguished by type: capital constraints and labour constraints. It notes the failure to incorporate this phenomenon in standard macro models. Using panel data for UK manufacturing over eighty quarters it is...

A new spatial decomposition of TFP growth into direct (own) and indirect (spillover) components is set out. We then apply the decomposition in the context of a spatial autoregressive production frontier analysis of 40 European countries over the period 1995-2008

We identify the attributes and limitations of spatial autoregressive stochastic frontier models, spatial inefficiency error stochastic frontier models, and straightforward integrated models. We also propose a separable spatial autoregressive combination stochastic frontier model that overcomes...