Andrew B. Abel

• University of Pennsylvania

I analyze investment, q, and cash flow in a tractable stochastic model in which marginal q and average q are identically equal. I introduce classical measurement error and derive closed-form expressions for the coefficients in regressions of investment on q and cash flow. The cash-flow coefficient is positive and larger for faster growing firms, ye...

The crowding-out coefficient is the ratio of the reduction in privately-issued bonds to the increase in government bonds that are issued to finance a tax cut. If (1) Ricardian equivalence holds, and (2) households do not borrow risklessly while holding positive gross positions in other riskless assets, the crowding-out coefficient equals the fracti...

We develop a model in which the opportunity for a firm to upgrade its tech- nology to the frontier (at a cost) leads to growth options in the firm's value; that is, a firm's value is the sum of value generated by its current technology plus the value of the option to upgrade. Variation in the technological fron- tier leads to variation in firm valu...

We derive a closed-form solution for Tobin's Q in a stochastic dynamic framework. We show analytically that investment is positively related to Tobin's Q and cash flow, even in the absence of adjustment costs or financing frictions. Both Q and investment move in the same direction as expected revenue growth, so changes in expected revenue growth in...

Continuing rapid growth in U.S. gasoline consumption threatens to exacerbate environmental and congestion problems. We use flexible semiparametric and nonparametric methods to guide analysis of household gasoline consumption, and including this variable cuts the estimated income elasticity in half. Slower projected future growth in licensed drivers...

Recurrent intervals of inattention to the stock market are optimal if consumers incur a utility cost to observe asset values. When consumers observe the value of their wealth, they decide whether to transfer funds between a transactions account from which consumption must be financed and an investment portfolio of equity and riskless bonds. Transfe...

I calculate exact expressions for risk premia, term premia, and the premium on levered equity in a framework that includes habit formation, keeping/catching up with the Joneses, and possible departures from rational expectations. Closed-form expressions for the first and second moments of returns and for the R2 of a regression of stock returns on t...

In this paper we examine the impact of membership in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) on trade between PTA members. Rather than considering the impact of PTA membership on the volume of trade we consider the impact of membership on the structure of trade. For a large sample of countries over the period 1962-2000 we find that membership in a PTA...

� Inattentive agents update their information sporadically, and thus respond belatedly to news. We generate optimally inattentive behavior by assuming that to observe the value of his invest- ment portfolio the consumer must pay a cost that is proportional to the portfolio's contempo - raneous value. It is optimal for the consumer to check his inve...

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I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the Modified Golde...

This paper analyzes the relationship between banks’ divergent strategies toward specialization and diversification of financial activities and their ability to withstand a banking sector crash. We first generate market-based measures of banks’ systemic risk exposures using extreme value analysis. Systemic banking risk is measured as the tail be...

Is the stock market boom a result of the baby boom? This paper develops an overlapping generations model in which a baby boom is modeled as a high realization of a random birth rate, and the price of capital is determined endogenously by a convex cost of adjustment. A baby boom increases national saving and investment and thus causes an increase in...

The subjective distribution of growth rates of aggregate consumption,is characterized by pessimism if it is first-order stochastically dominated by the objective distribution. Uniform pessimism is a leftward translation of the objective distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate. The subjective distribution is characterizedby doubt if it is m...

"Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street," observed legendary speculator Jesse Livermore. History tells us that periods of major technological innovation are typically accompanied by speculative bubbles as economic agents overreact to genuine advancements in productivity. Excessive run-ups in asset pri...

The Modified Golden Rule, which relates the rate of return on capital and the growth rate of the capital stock along long-run growth paths that maximize the utility of a representative infinitively-lived consumer, is invariant to the introduction of convex capital adjustment costs. Therefore, along balanced growth paths in neoclassical optimal grow...

General equilibrium models that predict a reduction in asset prices when baby boomers retire typically assume that people consume all of their wealth before they die. However, many people hold substantial wealth when they die. I develop a rational expectations, general equilibrium model with a bequest motive. In this model, a baby boom increases st...

With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully funded defined-contribution Social Security system tries to exploit the equity premium by selling a dollar of bonds per capita and buying a dollar of equity per capi...

Given the static condition of the global economy marketers are cutting advertising budgets commensurate with dismal sales. It is a longstanding belief that utilizing a standardized advertising approach not only controls good ideas and provides for a consistent image but it also has the benefit of controlling expenses through economies of scale. Wit...

The equity premium consists of a term premium reflecting the longer maturity of equity relative to short-term bills, and a risk premium reflecting the stochastic nature of equity payoffs and the deterministic nature of payoffs on riskless bills. This paper analyzes term premia and risk premia in a general equilibrium model with catching up with the...

Optimal investment depends both on expected returns and the costs of acquiring and installing capital. Empirical work using q-theory has emphasized the measurement of expected returns using Tobin's q, while more recent theoretical work focuses on investment costs, particularly fixed costs and irreversibility. This paper uses panel data to estimate...

This paper derives closed-form solutions for the investment and market value, under uncertainty, of competitive firms with constant returns to scale production and convex costs of adjustment. Solutions are derived for the case of irreversible investment as well as for reversible investment. Optimal investment is a non-decreasing function of q, the...

When factors of production can be adjusted costlessly, the mix of factors can be considered separately from their scale. We examine factor choice and utilization when investment is irreversible and subject to a fixed cost, so that the capital stock is a quasi-fixed factor that is adjusted infrequently and by discrete amounts. We derive and analyze...

Our paper models the relationship between price and quality regulation in a physical network industry. The analysis is closely inspired by some of the major regulatory features of the current organisation of the British railways industry, even though its insights have more general implications. Our model focuses on the combination of price and qual...

This paper derives closed-form solutions for the investment and value of a competitive firm with a constant-returns-to-scale production function and convex costs of adjustment. Solutions are derived for the case of irreversible investment as well as for reversible investment. Optimal investment is a non-decreasing function of q, the shadow value of...

Capital investment decisions must recognize the limitations on the firm's ability to later sell or expand capacity. This paper shows how opportunities for future expansion or contraction can be valued as options, how their valuation relates to the q theory of investment, and their effect on the incentive to invest. Generally, the option to expand r...

Capital investment decisions must recognize the limitations on the firm's ability to later sell or expand capacity. This paper shows how opportunities for future expansion or contraction can be valued as options, how their valuation relates to the q theory of investment, and their effect on the incentive to invest. Generally, the option to expand r...

Investment is characterized by costly reversibility when a firm can purchase capital at a given price and sell capital at a lower price. We solve for the optimal investment of a firm that faces costly reversibility under uncertainty and we extend the Jorgensonian concept of the user cost of capital to this case. We define and calculate cU and cL as...

Irreversibility and uncertainty increase the user cost of capital which tends to reduce the capital stock. Working in the opposite direction is a hangover effect, which arises because irreversibility prevents the firm from selling capital even when the marginal revenue product of capital is low. Neither the user cost effect nor the hangover effect...

In recent years Robert Barro's (1974) ingenious model of inter- generational altruism has taken its place among the major theories of consumption and saving. Despite its policy importance, there have been few direct tests of the Barro model. This paper presents a new direct test that is based on a property of the Barro model that, to our knowledge,...

This paper extends the theory of investment under uncertainty to incorporate fixed costs of investment, a wedge between the purchase price and sale price of capital, and potential irreversibility of investment. In this extended framework, investment is a nondecreasing function of q, the shadow price of installed capital. The optimal rate of investm...

Project with negative expected value cannot obtain financing in competitive capital markets if all potential investors are risk neutral and have identical beliefs about the distribution of the project’s net revenue. We present a series of examples with heterogeneous beliefs in which it is possible for a project to obtain financing even though all i...

This paper derives simple closed-form solutions for expected rates of return on stocks and riskless one-period bills under the assumption that shocks to the growth rates of consumption and dividends are generated by a Markov regime-switching process. These closed-form solutions are used to show that the Markov regime-switching process exacerbates t...

Recent work demonstrates that dynastic assumptions guarantee the irrelevance of redistributional policies, distortionary taxes, and prices--the neutrality of fiscal policy (Ricardian equivalence) is only the "tip of the iceberg." This paper investigates the possibility of reinstating approximate Ricardian equivalence by introducing a small amount o...

Consumption and investment expenditure together account for 80 percent of gross national product (GNP) in the United States and for a similarly large percentage of GNP in other major economies. This chapter discusses the behavior of consumption and investment focusing on the response of these components of spending to changes in income and to chang...

This paper introduces a utility function that nests three classes of utility functions: (1) time-separable utility functions; (2) "catching up with the Joneses" utility functions that depend on the consumer's level of consumption relative to the lagged cross-sectional average level of consumption; and (3) utility functions that display habit format...

The effects on asset prices of changes in risk are studied in a general equilibrium model in which the conditional risk evolves stochastically over time. The saving decisions of consumers take account of the fact that conditional risk is a serially correlated random variable. By restricting the specification of consumers' preferences and the stocha...

"This paper analyzes the effects of lump-sum tax policy in an overlapping generations model in which consumers have uncertain longevity. It extends previous analyses by considering the case in which private insurance arrangements are actuarially unfair. In addition, it considers the polar case of actuarially fair insurance and the polar case of no...

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 eviden...

The issue of dynamic efficiency is central to analyses of capital accumulation and economic growth. Yet the question of what characteristics should be examined to determine whether actual economies are dynamically efficient is unresolved. This paper develops a criterion for determining whether an economy is dynamically efficient. The criterion, whi...

This paper investigates the intraday price volatility process in four Australian wholesale electricity markets; namely New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria. The data set consists of half-hourly electricity prices and demand volumes over the period January 1, 2002 to June 1, 2003. A range of processes including GARCH, RiskMetric...

The US economy is arguably following an unsustainable trajectory. The main indicators of this are a large current account deficit, a large federal budget deficit and trend-wise increasing costs of Social Security and Medicare. In this chapter, we will discuss these observations and to what extent the financial and economic crisis may have changed t...

This chapter attempts to give a structural interpretation to the distributed lag of sales on investment at the two–digit level in U.S. manufacturing. It first presents a simple model that 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 info...

This paper analyzes the joy of giving bequest motive in which the utility obtained from leaving a bequest depends only on the size of the bequest. It exploits the fact that this formulation can be interpreted as a reduced form of an altruistic bequest motive to derive a relation between the value of the altruism parameter and the value of the joy o...

Various tax policies provide consumers with forms of insurance. Social security has the payoff characteristics of an annuity. Income tax provides consumers with a degree of income insurance because the government shares part of the individual’s income risk. Redistributive taxes can be used to spread aggregate income risks across different generatio...

In the presence of uncertain lifetimes, social security has the characteristics of an annuity: a consumer pays a tax when young in exchange for receiving a social security benefit if he survives to be old. If consumers have identical ex ante mortality probabilities, then a fully funded social security system would offer a rate of return equal to th...

Forecasts are an inherent part of economic science and the quest for perfect foresight occupies economists and researchers in multiple fields. The release of economic forecasts (and its revisions) is a popular and often publicized event, with a multitude of institutions and think-tanks devoted almost exclusively to that task. The European Central B...

Since unification, the debate about Germany's poor economic performance has focused on supply-side weaknesses, and the associated reform agenda sought to make low-skill labour markets more flexible. We question this diagnosis using three lines of argument. First, effective restructuring of the supply side in the core advanced industries was carried...

In the absence of monetary superneutrality, inflation affects capital accumulation and the demand for real balances. This paper derives the combination of monetary and lump-sum fiscal policy which maximizes the sum of discounted utilities of representative consumers in present and future generations. Under the optimal policy package, the steady sta...

The Ricardian Equivalence Theorem, which is the proposition that changes in the timing of lump-sum taxes have no effect on assumption or capital accumulation, depends on the exist- of operative altruistic motives for intergenerational transfers. These transfers can be bequests from parents to children or gifts from children to parents. In order for...

The Ricardian Equivalence Theorem is the proposition that the method of financing any particular path of government expenditure is irrelevant. More precisely, the choice between levying lump-sum taxes and issuing government bonds to finance government spending does not affect the consumption of any household nor does it affect capital formation. Th...

Much of the empirical work on investment is based on the existence of a relation between investment and the expected present value of marginal profits. 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 ser...

Although the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem holds under a linear estate tax schedule, it fails to hold under a nonlinear estate tax schedule. In a representative consumer economy, a temporary lump-sum tax increase reduces contemporaneous consumption. If different consumers face different marginal estate tax rates because they leave bequests of diffe...

This paper examines the implications of adverse selection in the private annuity market for the pricing of private annuities and the consequent effects on constrption and bequest behavior. With privately known heterogeneous mortality probabilities, adverse selection causes the rate of return on private annuities to be less than the actuarially fair...

The fact that consumers do not know in advance the dates at which they will die effects their individual consumption and portfolio decisions. In general, some consumers will end up leaving bequests at death, even if they have no bequest motive, simply because they happen to die at a time when they are holding wealth to provide for their own future...

This paper presents closed-form solutions for the investment and valuation of a competitive firm with a Cobb-Douglas production function and a constant elasticity adjustment cost function in the presence of stochastic prices for output and inputs. The value of the firm is a linear function of the capital stock. The optimal rate of investmentis an i...

The subjective value given to time, also known as the psychological interest rate, or the subjective price of time, is a core concept of the microeconomic choices. Individual decisions using a unique and constant subjective interest rate will refer to an exponential discounting function. However, many empirical and behavioural studies underline the...

This paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of capital accumulation in Stockman's cash-in-advance model. If the cash-in-advance constraint applies only to consumption, then money is superneutral along the transition path as well as in the long run. Alternatively, if the cash-in-advance constraint applies to gross investment as well as consumption, the...

We briefly review the rationale behind technological alliances and provide a snapshot of their role in global competition, especially insofar as it is based around intellectual capital. They nicely illustrate the increased importance of horizontal agreements and thus establish the relevance of the topic. We move on to discuss the organisation of in...

If stock-outs are ignored and if demand shocks are additive, then optimal behaviour requires that the marginal cost of production (MC) be equated with the expected marginal revenue of increasing expected sales by one unit (EMR). However, with more general demand shocks (and still ignoring stock-outs), the excess of MC over EMR has the same sign as...

This paper examines the effects of output price uncertainty on the optimal investment behavior of a risk-neutral competitive firm with a constant returns to scale production function. In the presence of convex costs of adjustment, investment is an increasing function of q, the shadow price of capital. Given the current price of output, we find that...

This paper analyzes an important class of models in which expectations play an important role. Topics included in the analysis are tests of: (1) rationality of forecasts in either market or survey data, (2) capital market efficiency, (3) the short-run neutrality of monetary policy and, (4) Granger causality in macroeconometric models. The common el...

This paper provides a new rationale for Uzawa preferences based on social choice; instead of positing that poor people are more patient because they are poor, it posits that poor people should be more patient if they wish their living standards to catch up with richer people. To provide a setting for this new rationale, the present paper studies th...

This paper compares the durability of goods produced in competitive and monopolistic markets. Durability is chosen to minimize the cost of providing a given present value of flow of services over the life of the durable. As pointed out by Swan, under constant returns to scale, the cost-minimizing durability is independent of the level of output; th...

price uncertainty on the investment decision of a risk-neutral competitive firm which faces convex costs of adjustment.' This issue has been analyzed by Richard Hartman (1972) and by Robert Pindyck (1982), but they reached dramatically different results. Hart- man showed that with a linearly homogeneous production function, increased output price u...

This paper incorporates the tax policy analysis of Hall and Jorgenson into a dynamic optimizing model with adjustment costs to develop a q model of investment. This framework is particularly useful for analyzing the dynamic effects on investment of permanent and temporary changes in tax policy. It is shown that, contrary to the conventional interte...

The effect on investment of temporary tax rate changes depends on the age profile of depreciation deduct ions. If the depreciation allowance schedule is accelerated, then temporary cuts in the corporate tax rate could reduce investment. Inflation causes the age profile of real depreciation deductions to become accelerated and thus could make tempor...

This paper develops a dynamic optimizing model of a firm with quasi-fixed factors subject to adjustment costs. The utilization rates of the quasi-fixed factors are chosen optimally by the firm, and the rates of investment in the quasi-fixed factors are based on the shadow prices of these factors, in the spirit of Tobin's q theory of investment. Cap...

Auerbach (1979, 1981) has demonstrated that inflation can lead to large inter-asset distortions, with the negative effects of higher inflation unambiguously declining with asset life. We show that this is true only if depreciation is treated as geometric for tax purposes. When depreciation is straightline, higher inflation can have the opposite eff...

This paper develops a Keynesian model of the Portuguese economy in which the prices of the sectors of final demand are derived from input-output relationships. This model is used for short-run simulation analysis of the Portuguese economy through 1977. It is seen that Portugal cannot simply rely on world demand for its exports to improve its balanc...

Thesis--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bibliography: p. 184-186. Investment theory: an integration of two approaches.--Investment, q, and rational expectations.--Fiscal stimulus to investment: tax cut or investment tax credit?--Limited ex post substitutability and optimal variations in capacity utilization.