Search Results
Showing results 1 to 7 of approximately 7.
(refine search)
Working Paper
A new approach to the valuation of intangible capital
Intangible capital is not a distinct factor of production as is physical capital or labor. Rather it is the "glue" that creates value from other factor inputs. This perspective naturally suggests an empirical model in which intangible capital is defined in terms of adjustment costs. My estimates of these adjustment costs from firm-level panel data suggest that no appreciable intangibles are associated with R&D and advertising, whereas information technology creates intangibles with a 72% annual rate of return--a sizable figure that is nevertheless much smaller than that reported in previous ...
Working Paper
Optimal investment with fixed refinancing costs
Case studies show that corporate managers seek financial independence to avoid interference by outside financiers. We incorporate this financial xenophobia as a fixed cost in a simple dynamic model of financing and investment. To avoid refinancing in the future, the firm alters its behavior depending on the extent of its financial xenophobia and the realization of a revenue shock. With a sufficiently adverse shock, the firm holds no liquidity. Otherwise, the firm precautionarily saves and holds both liquidity and external finance. Investment always responds to neoclassical fundamentals, but ...
Working Paper
Investment behavior, observable expectations, and internal funds
We use earnings forecasts from securities analysts to construct more accurate measures of the fundamentals that affect the expected returns to investment. We find that investment responds significantly -- in both economic and statistical terms -- to our new measures of fundamentals. Our estimates imply that the elasticity of the investment-capital ratio with respect to a change in fundamentals is generally greater than unity. In addition, we find that internal funds are uncorrelated with investment spending, even for selected subsamples of firms -- those paying no dividends and those without ...
Working Paper
Investment-specific technical change in the US (1947-2000): measurement and macroeconomics consequences
By extrapolating Gordon's (1990) measures of the quality-bias in the official price indexes, we construct quality-adjusted price indexes for 24 types of equipment and software (E&S) from 1947 to 2000 and use them to measure technical change at the aggregate and at the industry level. Technological improvement in E&S accounts for an important fraction of postwar GDP growth and plays a key role in the productivity resurgence of the 1990s. Driving this finding is 4 percent annual growth in the quality of E&S in the postwar period and more than 6 percent annual growth in the 1990s. The ...
Working Paper
The dark side of competitive pressure
One of the most basic principles in economics is that competitive pressure promotes efficiency. However, this pressure can also have a dark side because it makes firms reluctant to act on private information that is unpopular with consumers. As a result, firms that possess superior information about the consequences of their actions for consumers' welfare may choose not to use it. We develop this idea in a simple model of delegated investment in which agents are fully rational and risk neutral, and agency problems are absent. We show that competitive pressure obliges firms to make inefficient ...
Working Paper
A retrospective evaluation of the effects of temporary partial expensing
This paper examines how business investment responded to temporary partial expensing, first enacted in 2002 and expanded in 2003. In principle, partial expensing boosted the incentive to invest which should have had a discernable impact on spending. However, the tax changes did not occur in a vacuum, so it is challenging to isolate their impact. Our empirical approach exploits a feature of the tax change which, under certain assumptions, allows us to cleanly estimate its impact. Specifically, partial expensing provided relatively generous tax treatment for long-lived assets. We use this ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty and investment: an empirical investigation using data on analysts' profits forecasts
We investigate the empirical relationship between company investment and measures of uncertainty, controlling for the effect of expected future profitability on current investment decisions. We consider three measures of uncertainty derived from (1) the volatility in the firm's stock returns; (2) disagreement among securities analysts in their forecasts of the firm's future profits; and (3) the variance of forecast errors in analysts' forecasts of the firm's future profits. We consider two controls for expected profitability: (1) a standard measure of Brainard-Tobin's q constructed from the ...