G31 - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies; Capacity
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The Canadian corporate investment gap
Business investment has been lower than expected in Canada and abroad since the financial crisis of 2007–09. This corporate investment gap is mirrored in firms’ other financing decisions, as they have increased cash holdings and dividend payments and decreased issuance of debt and equity. -
Identifying Aggregate Shocks with Micro-level Heterogeneity: Financial Shocks and Investment Fluctuation
This paper identifies aggregate financial shocks and quantifies their effects on business investment based on an estimated DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. On average, financial shocks contribute only 3% of the variation in U.S. public firms’ aggregate investment. -
Firm-level Investment Under Imperfect Capital Markets in Ukraine
This paper develops and estimates a model of firm-level fixed capital investment when firms face borrowing constraints. -
The Role of Corporate Saving over the Business Cycle: Shock Absorber or Amplifier?
We document countercyclical corporate saving behavior with the degree of countercyclicality varying nonmonotonically with firm size. We then develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to explain the pattern and study its implications for business cycles. -
May 11, 2017
Why Is Global Business Investment So Weak? Some Insights from Advanced Economies
Various drivers of business investment can be used to explain the underwhelming performance of investment in advanced economies since the global financial crisis, particularly since 2014. The slow growth in aggregate demand cannot by itself explain the full extent of the recent weakness in investment, which appears to be linked primarily to the collapse of global commodity prices and a rise in economic uncertainty. Looking ahead, business investment growth is likely to remain slower than in the pre-crisis period, largely because of structural factors such as population aging. -
What Is Behind the Weakness in Global Investment?
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 developments in non-residential private business investment in large advanced economies since the crisis. -
The Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited
In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors’ methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989–1998 and show that the returns to private and public equity are similar. -
Corporate Risk Taking and Ownership Structure
This paper investigates the determinants of corporate risk taking. Shareholders with substantial equity ownership in a single company may advocate conservative investment policies due to greater exposure to firm risk. -
Complex Ownership and Capital Structure
This paper investigates the impact of pyramid ownership structure and multiple controlling shareholders on firm leverage. Pyramids, having at least one controlling shareholder and a subsidiary, rely significantly more on debt financing than non-pyramid firms.