Investment and Sales: Some Empirical Evidence

This paper attempts to give a structural interpretation to the distributed lag of sales on investment at the two-digit level in US manufacturing. It first presents a simple model which captures the various sources of lags and their respective implications. It then estimates the model, using both data on investment and sales as well as direct evidence on the sources of lags. The spirit of the paper is exploratory ; the model is used mainly as a vehicle to construct, present and interpret the data. We find that the following model can roughly generate the distributed lag structure found in the data. Firms face delivery lags of 3 quarters. They also face adjustment costs, which lead them to take into account expected future sales, with discount factor -9 when constructing the desired capital stock, and to close about 5% of the gap between actual and desired capital per quarter. They pay for orders at a constant rate between the time of order and that of delivery. The model is however not very successful in explaining differences in dynamics across sectors.

An Intertemporal Model of Saving and Investment

The standard model of optimal growth, interpreted as a model of a market economy with infinitely long-lived agents, does not allow separation of the savings decisions of agents from the investment decisions of firms. Investment is essentially passive: the "one good" assumption leads to a perfectly elastic investment supply; the absence of installation costs for investment leads to a perfectly elastic investment demand. On the other hand, the standard model of temporary equilibrium used in macroeconomics characterizes both the savings-consumption decision and the investment decision, or, equivalently, derives a well-behaved aggregate demand which, in equilibrium, must be equal to aggregate supply. Often, however, we want to study the movement of the temporary equilibrium over time in response to a particular shock or policy. The discrepancy between the treatment of investment in the two models makes imbedding the temporary equilibrium model in the growth model difficult. This paper characterizes the dynamic behavior of the optimal growth model with adjustment costs. It shows the similarity between the temporary equilibrium of the corresponding market economy and the short-run equilibrium of standard macroeconomic models: consumption depends on wealth, investment on Tobin's q. Equilibrium is maintained by the endogenous adjustment of the term structure of interest rates. It then shows how the equivalence can be used to study the dynamic effects of policies; it considers various fiscal policies and exploits their equivalence to technological shifts in the optimal growth problem.

Investment and Sales: Some Empirical Evidence

This paper attempts to give a structural interpretation to the distributed lag of sales on investment at the two-digit level in US manufacturing. It first presents a simple model which captures the various sources of lags and their respective implications. It then estimates the model, using both data on investment and sales as well as direct evidence on the sources of lags. The spirit of the paper is exploratory ; the model is used mainly as a vehicle to construct, present and interpret the data. We find that the following model can roughly generate the distributed lag structure found in the data. Firms face delivery lags of 3 quarters. They also face adjustment costs, which lead them to take into account expected future sales, with discount factor -9 when constructing the desired capital stock, and to close about 5% of the gap between actual and desired capital per quarter. They pay for orders at a constant rate between the time of order and that of delivery. The model is however not very successful in explaining differences in dynamics across sectors

The Present Value of Profits and Cyclical Movements in Investment

Most of the empirical work on investment is based on the existence of a relation between investment and the expected present val of marginal profits.Thus, in this paper we compute such a present value series, under various assumptions about demand and technology and examine its relation to investment.We find that variations in this present value series are, surprisingly,due more to variations in the cost of capital than to variations in marginal profit. We also find that the present value series, although significantly related to investment, still leaves unexplained a large, serially correlated fraction of investment

An Intertemporal Model of Saving and Investment

The standard model of optimal growth, interpreted as a model of a market economy with infinitely long-lived agents, does not allow separation of the savings decisions of agents from the investment decisions of firms. Investment is essentially passive: the one good assumption leads to a perfectly elastic investment supply; the absence of installation costs for investment leads to a perfectly elastic investment demand. On the other hand, the standard model of temporary equilibrium used in macroeconomics characterizes both the savings-consumption decision and the investment decision, or, equivalently, derives a well-behaved aggregate demand which, in equilibrium, must be equal to aggregate supply. Often, however, we want to study the movement of the temporary equilibrium over time in response to a particular shock or policy. The discrepancy between the treatment of investment in the two models makes imbedding the temporary equilibrium model in the growth model difficult. This paper characterizes the dynamic behavior of the optimal growth model with adjustment costs. It shows the similarity between the temporary equilibrium of the corresponding market economy and the short-run equilibrium of standard macroeconomic models: consumption depends on wealth, investment on Tobin\u27s q. Equilibrium is maintained by the endogenous adjustment of the term structure of interest rates. It then shows how the equivalence can be used to study the dynamic effects of policies; it considers various fiscal policies and exploits their equivalence to technological shifts in the optimal growth problem

La condition laïque. Réflexions sur la laïcité en Turquie et en France

Après une analyse de la fragilité de la laïcité, tant en France qu'en Turquie, tiraillée entre les deux logiques de l'uniformisation marchande et de la balkanisation ethnique, les phénomènes de laïcisation et de sécularisation sont mis en regard. Puis sont établies les conditions d'une éthique de la laïcité, dans la confrontation des « urbanités ». Cela suppose que les différentes « morales » traditionnelles ou modernes en présence acceptent de se corriger les unes les autres, et de construire ainsi un espace cohabitable

La condition laïque: réflexions sur le problème de la laïcité en Turquie et en France

Le sentiment d'une fragilité de la laïcité est un bon point de départ pour notre réflexion, parce que cette fragilité atteste dans le même temps que la laïcité est dans une situa­tion critique, qu'elle désigne moins la plénitude d'une réponse que la forme d'un problème ; et que pourtant elle doit être préservée, placée sous notre commune respon­sabi­lité, parce qu'elle est aujourd'hui une condition indépassable de l'existence so­ciale. Les propos qui suivent se répartiront selon ces deux orie..

Que veut dire la laïcité ?

Dans un temps de dégel des blocs géopolitiques et de levée des mémoires, la laïcité est ébranlée car elle ne parvient plus à répondre simultanément à la demande d'identité et à la demande d'urbanité dont elle était l'équation. En Europe comme en Turquie elle doit être redéfinie. Cela suppose, du point de vue politique, d'accepter que la laïcité est difficile dans des pays mono-religieux et peut-être mono-culturels. Cela suppose du point de vue religieux une « subjectivisation » pluraliste, et qui refuse d'être réduite à un élément identitaire