Government fiscal aggregates are often manipulated over the course of the business cycle in order to provide counter-cyclical stimulus. Changes that are not discretionary--the so-called "built-in stabilizers"--also significantly vary over the business cycle, in a manner that is even more...

This paper examines three questions motivated by previous research on semiconductors and productivity growth: Why did semiconductor prices fall so rapidly in the second half of the 1990s? Why has the rate of price decline slowed since 2001? And to what extent are these price swings associated...

This paper uses data from machinery dealers to estimate the retirement and depreciation patterns for a broad set of conventional machine tools. According to the dealers, the average service life of these machines at the survey date was about thirty years. Service lives were even longer in the...

What accounts for the apparent preference of firms to finance investment with internal funds? Recent theories stress information problems in capital markets, while older theories emphas ize the transactions costs of external finance. To test these competing hypotheses, the authors estimate the...

Using data on union certification elections, the authors estimate the impact of unionization on firms' investment behavior. Employing both a standard q model and an 'investment surprises' technique, they find that union certification significantly reduces investment in the year following the...

The authors consider the impact of tax policy uncertainty on firm level and aggregate investment, comparing investment behavior when uncertainty is due to a shock following geometric Brownian motion (GBM) versus when random discrete jumps in tax policy occur. Expectations of the likelihood of a...