This paper is the first paper to break user cost into its natural pieces - the risk-adjusted market interest rate, tax variables, and the price of capital goods - and estimate the long-run effect of each on the capital stock.Why is the separation of user cost into interest rate, tax, and capital...

The effect of interest rates, capital goods prices, and taxes on the capital stock is an issue of central importance in economics, with implications for monetary policy, business cycle models, tax policy, economic development, growth, and other areas. For more than 30 years it has been difficult...

Financial market imperfections - particularly finance constraints - play an important role in modern corporate finance, but relatively little work has been done on the interaction between corporate finance and the broad operation of financial markets. In particular, relatively little has been...

When investment is irreversible, theory suggests that firms will be quot;reluctant to invest.quot; This reluctance creates a wedge between the discount rate guiding investment decisions and the standard Jorgensonian user cost (adjusted for risk). We use the intertemporal tradeoff between the...

Is real investment fully determined by fundamentals or is it sometimes affected by stock market misvaluation? We introduce three new tests that: measure the reaction of investment to sales shocks for firms that may be overvalued; use Fama-MacBeth regressions to determine whether overinvestment...

This paper uses regime-switching econometrics to study stock market crashes and to explore the ability of two very different economic explanations to account for historical crashes. The first explanation is based on historical accounts of quot;manias and panics.quot; Its key features are that...

This paper tests between fads and bubbles using a new empirical strategy (based on switching-regression econometrics) for distinguishing between competing asset-pricing models. By extending the Blanchard and Watson (1982) model, we show how stochastic bubbles can lead to regime-switching in...

By studying the gap between the discount rates used by executives and shareholders, we assess the extent to which governance problems distort firm behavior. The estimation strategy recovers discount rates used by executives from the pattern of their actual investment spending. Our empirical work...