Investment, irreversibility and financial imperfections: the rush to invest and the option to wait

The impact of combinations of frictions on investment activity is poorly understood. We develop a model of investment under financial frictions and irreversibility. We show that the possibility of encountering financial constraints in future raises irreversible investment today over that arising under irreversibility alone. By contrast, investment under both frictions is lower than under future financial constraints alone.

Whither Job Destruction? Unemployment, Job Flows and Hours in a New Keynesian Model

Labour markets play a key role in business cycle analysis. Although a focal point of research on unemployment over the past decade, endogenous job destruction has recently fallen into disfavour, since its introduction leads to a positively sloped Beveridge curve. We show that introducing variation in hours per worker - a second margin for labour input adjustment in combination with endogenous job destruction generates a negatively sloped Beveridge curve, a data consistent correlation structure for job flows and captures many aspects of the cyclical behaviour of hours per worker. This improved peformance is robust to wage rigidity (which raises the variability of unemployment and labour market tightness) and a wide range of empirically plausible labour supply elasticities - but not completely inelastic labour supply implicit in much of the literature on labour market search.

Investment and Dividends under Irreversibility and Financial Constraints

Research finds that firms' investment and dividend policies are distorted by irreversibility and finance constraints. Whereas the existing literature examines these features separately, this paper considers their interaction. The main theoretical result concerns the separation of the investment and payout thresholds. The ordering of investment and distribution activities is endogenously determined and depends on the levels of capacity and cash balances in a manner consistent with a life- cycle interpretation of firm behaviour. The concavity of the revenue function is capital stock and the complementarily of the constraints drive these results. Important ramifications for empirical work on investment are discussed.Investment, dividend policy, irreversibility, financial constraints

Unemployment, Job Flows and Hours in a New Keynesian Model

New Keynesian models attempt to account for economic fluctuations under nominal rigidities without modelling unemployment. They struggle to generate observed output and inflation persistence. To address these issues, recent research embeds labour search with matching frictions in a New Keynesian framework. Models with labour market search, matching and endogenous job destruction, feature unemployment, but generate an upward sloping Beveridge curve and overly volatile gross job flows. By introducing a second margin, hours, in the adjustment of labour input I obtain a negative unemployment-vacancy correlation and plausible gross job flow volatilities without affecting the desirable persistence properties of the model. I show that these results are affected by real wage rigidity, endogenous job destruction and capital adjustment costsBeveridge Curve, Hours, Gross Job Flows, Inflation

Investment, Irreversibility, and Financial Imperfections

Research finds that firms' investment decisions are distorted by irreversibility and finance constraints. Whereas the existing literature examines the exects of these features separately, this paper studies their interaction. The impact of these constraints on a firm's incentive to invest is characterised using option pricing techniques. Financial constraints reduce the initial capacity, raise the marginal value product of capital and the value of the option to invest.Irreversible investment, financial constraints

Two Cheers for the Aggregated (S, s) Model!

Aggregated (S;s) models purport to provide a structural, microfounded and statistically robust explanation of aggregate investment uctuations. In this paper I analyse these claims, present several empirical puzzles arising from the model and discuss hoe the model might be extended to account for these puzzles.Economic Fluctuations, Investment, Factor Demand, Aggregated (S,s) rules, Model Specification