The U.S. Department of Commerce regularly surveys businesses on their plans for capital investment. This article assesses the contribution that these surveys make to forecasts of business investment, once other economic variables are taken into account. The author finds that the surveys have...

This article compares the investment spending for each of 396 corporations during the late 1980s and early 1990s to projections of their spending derived from several basic models of investment. According to these models, capital spending, on average, adheres closely to output, profits, and the...

uring the 1980s, the proportion of business assets financed by debt exceeded that of any other period since World War II. The characteristics of financial securities also changed, as junk bonds, variants of preferred stock, warrants, and other forms of mezzanine financing became more common in...

Insurance companies, like other financial institutions, have been evolving from specialized businesses to enterprises offering a variety of financial services. Rising interest rates impelled this evolution during much of the past three decades as most insurers tried to remain competitive....

Economic policymakers attempt to improve the welfare of their citizens, based on assumptions about how people think, feel, and behave, and on what they view as welfare-improving. Economists usually describe economic agents as fully informed and model them as striving to maximize a set of stable...

Many are worried that since 1980 capital investment by businesses has been lower than expected. Unusual circumstances, such as changes in savings patterns or in business leverage, a credit crunch, or widespread adoption of a shorter-term outlook, have been suggested as culprits. To see whether...

A currency board can allow a developing economy to establish its domestic currency relatively promptly and efficiently by fixing the value of its currency to that of another country and guaranteeing that its currency is backed by sufficient foreign exchange reserves. Currency boards not only...

The preceding article analyzed the determinants of investment at the macroeconomic level. In general, analysis of investment at this degree of aggregation implies that all firms in the economy react similarly to the same macro-level variables. Yet, examining macro data may obscure a great deal...