the importance of managerial ability on crude oil price uncertainty firm performance relationship abstract this paper investigates the effect of crude oil price uncertainty on firm performance and how the managerial ability impacts on this relationship using a large sample of 13 610 u s firms from 1983 to 2016 we reveal two main findings consistent with our hypothesis we find strong evidence for a negative effect of crude oil price uncertainty on firm performance at both aggregate market and sectoral levels however managerial ability helps firms dampen a significant proportion approximately 20 50 of the negative effect these findings are consistent in several robustness tests

effects of energy price rise on investment firm level evidence from indian manufacturing sector this paper analyses the effects of the rising prices of energy products on the investment of a large panel of manufacturing firms in india during 1993 2013 the prime motivation behind this study is the absence of an empirical study into this research issue exclusively on indian economy the empirical results obtained by estimating an error correction model ecm using generalized method of moments gmm show that energy price rise has negative effect on the investment of firms in the manufacturing sector the negative effect is transmitted to the firm s investment through both demand side and supply side factors the transmission also depends upon factors such as the energy intensity of production the results also show that the sales growth investment relationship becomes weak in the face of the rising prices of the energy which could be due to the cautious approach to investment adopted by the firms therefore it calls for the attention of the policy makers to evolve a comprehensive energy policy to ensure continuous supply of energy at affordable prices to the manufacturers

how do daily changes in oil prices affect us monthly industrial output detecting asymmetry has become increasingly difficult using single frequency data this paper goes beyond the prevailing use of aggregate averaged data in order to provide a more in depth treatment of the dynamic effects of the price of crude oil on industrial output growth to do so we propose an asymmetric mixed data sampling amidas model to examine if there is any concealed evidence of asymmetry arising from daily effects of the price of crude oil on monthly changes in industrial output in the united states us we find that this model is able to detect dynamic asymmetric impacts of a high frequency independent variable on a low frequency dependent variable more effectively than when the high frequency variable is aggregated up at the time interval of the low frequency variable we find that in comparison with the marginal lagged effects of a rise in the daily price of crude oil the effects of a fall in the daily price of crude oil are more sluggish as it takes longer for the effects of the oil price drop to die off over time this finding implies that a fall in the price of crude oil shifts the supply curve rightward less and at a much slower pace than an equivalent price rise shifts it to the left

asymmetric effects of oil price uncertainty on corporate investment abstract using a comprehensive data set of a large panel of us firms over 1984 2017 we show that the negative effect of crude oil price return uncertainty on investments is asymmetric in particular we show that investment is more significantly reduced following the volatility of positive oil price changes than that of negative changes and this asymmetric effect is more pronounced in small firms in addition we find that the asymmetric effect is stronger in the crude oil and gas producing companies where the effect of the volatility of negative oil price changes is greater than that of positive oil price changes we also find that the impact of positive or negative oil price change uncertainty on investments substantially differs across different industries the results are quite robust to the way in which we measure the investment and oil price uncertainty and to alternative regression methods

financial factors and investment in belgium france germany and the united kingdom a comparison using company panel data we construct company panel data sets for manufacturing firms in belgium france germany and the united kingdom covering the period 1978 1989 these data sets are used to estimate empirical investment equations and to investigate the role played by financial factors in each country a robust finding is that cash flow and profits terms appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more significant in the united kingdom than in the three continental european countries this is consistent with the suggestion that financial constraints on investment may be relatively severe in the more market oriented u k financial system

overinvestment and macroeconomic uncertainty evidence from renewable and non renewable resource firms abstract investment is an inherent component of business activities however what if firms invest more than they should this study examines this phenomenon which is dubbed as overinvestment among resource firms as induced by the business cycle and macroeconomic uncertainties the analysis is conducted using unbalanced panel data drawn from 584 resource companies across 32 countries covering 1986 to 2017 in four resource sectors 1 alternative energy 2 forestry and paper 3 mining and 4 oil and gas producers the results indicate that the forestry and paper sector overinvests relative to the standard investment level predicted by the investment function regardless of the sample period while the alternative energy sector tends to underinvest also many emerging economies including brazil china india indonesia russia and south korea are found to have overinvested over the last three decades or so in addition the results suggest that commodity price inflation plays a more important role in inducing firms overinvestment than commodity price uncertainty it is also found that the home country s business cycle significantly affects overinvestment with the sign alternating from negative to positive after the global financial crisis furthermore the finding also shows no significant relationship between global geopolitical risk and overinvestment but a significantly positive relationship is found between global economic and country level governance policy uncertainties and overinvestment lastly the results suggest that the effect of overinvestment on firm performance after three years is positive especially for firms in the mining sector

product market competition and the impact of price uncertainty on investment some evidence from us manufacturing industries the authors estimate the impact of price uncertainty on investment using a panel of u s manufacturing industries pooling the data for all industries uncertainty has no impact on current investment however for industries that have low levels of seller concentration and thus are likely to be highly competitive the estimated impact is negative and statistically significant while for industries with high levels of seller concentration the impact is always small and not significantly different from zero the finding of a negative relationship between investment and price uncertainty in competitive industries is broadly consistent with models that incorporate irreversibility of capital investment copyright 1996 by blackwell publishing ltd

consumer response to the timing of income evidence from a change in tax withholding in 1992 the income tax withholding tables were adjusted so that withholding was reduced a typical worker received an extra 28 80 in take home pay per month in march through december 1992 to be offset by a lower tax refund in 1993 the change in withholding amounted to 0 5 percent of gdp president bush who proposed this change in his state of the union address intended that it provide a temporary stimulus to demand but the policy change involved only the timing of income so under the life cycle permanent income model it would be predicted to have a negligible effect on consumption and aggregate demand this paper reports consumers responses to the change in withholding the results are based on a survey taken shortly after it went into effect forty three percent of consumers report spending the extra take home pay substantially more than the zero percent predicted by the standard models but substantially less than the one hundred percent upon which the policy was predicated the decision to save the income is not explained by expected income growth therefore while behavior of many households is not fully consistent with the life cycle permanent income model liquidity constraints do not appear to account for this behavior this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

foreign direct investment and investment under uncertainty we show that in uncertain environments ownership and internalization advantages may be negatively rather than positively associated with fdi this reversal from extant theory occurs because ownership advantages often serve to make fdi delayable while internalization advantages often serve to make it less reversible when fdi becomes either more delayable or less reversible it is less likely to occur at a point in time our approach enriches the who where and why explanations offered by current fdi theory to incorporate the question of when

testing for liquidity constraints in euler equations with complementary data sources previous tests for liquidity constraints using consumption euler equations have frequently split the sample on the basis of wealth arguing that low wealth consumers are more likely to be constrained we propose alternative tests using different and more direct information on borrowing constraints obtained from the 1983 survey of consumer finances in a first stage we estimate probabilities of being constrained which are then utilized in a second sample the panel study of income dynamics to estimate switching regression models of the euler equation our estimates indicate stronger excess sensitivity associated with the possibility of liquidity constraints than the sample splitting approach

the response of expenditures to anticipated income changes panel data estimates standard models of intertemporal allocation predict that the time path of expenditures should be independent of the time path of income recently two papers parker 1999 and souleles 1999 have suggested that u s households have a high marginal propensity to spend within year anticipated income changes we use an expenditure survey panel from spain to re examine this issue we exploit two important features of the spanish data first we have quarterly panel data that follows households for more than four quarters second we use the fact that workers are exogenously sorted into one of two payment schemes some receive the same amount each month of the year and others receive an extra payment in june and december the extra payment is large and predictable we examine the detailed pattern of expenditures over the year to see whether they differ between the two groups we fail to find even weak differences we complement this with a conventional euler equation analysis of excess sensitivity our predicting equation for quarterly earnings growth is much better than usual and is likely to give a powerful test of the hypothesis that predictable changes in income do not lead to changes in expenditure patterns the results of this analysis confirm the graphical analysis we find no evidence of excess sensitivity we conclude that households in normal times do smooth consumption over the year we suggest a reconciliation of our results with those of parker and souleles

what drives volatility in natural gas prices abstract we examine the primary drivers of u s natural gas price volatility to do so we apply a structural heterogeneous autoregressive var shvar model accommodating structural breaks in both the coefficient and volatility to monthly time series data on natural gas supply demand and price between january 1978 and july 2018 we detect several structural changes in coefficients and shock volatility in the natural gas market our findings indicate that the response of natural gas prices differs significantly depending on the regime and type of shock in the natural gas market while demand shocks specific to the natural gas market are the primary drivers of natural gas price volatility structural supply shocks also play a significant role in explaining movements in natural gas prices our results suggest that failure to consider structural breaks in the coefficient and volatility may result in biased estimates and distorted impulse responses of the impact of shocks on natural gas price volatility

the effect of oil price volatility on strategic investment in this paper we investigate how oil price volatility affects the strategic investment decisions of a large panel of us firms this paper uses key insights from the real options literature to develop a model of a company s strategic investment and shows how changes in oil price volatility can impact strategic investment decisions the model is estimated using recently developed generalized method of moment estimation techniques for panel data sets empirical results are presented to show that there is a u shaped relationship between oil price volatility and firm investment this is consistent with the predictions from the strategic growth options literature the results should be useful to decision makers investors managers policy makers and others who need to make strategic investment decisions in an uncertain world

corporate finance side of the q theory of investment abstract this paper presents a model of a firm under uncertainty in which the financial and investment decisions are simultaneously determined if profits are small relative to investment the firm finances a constant fraction of incremental investment by debt and the rest by retentions if profits are large relative to investment a constant fraction of marginal finance comes from debt and the rest from new shares in these two financing regimes a one to one relationship between optimal investment and q can be derived no such relation exists in the third and intermediate regime in which incremental investment is entirely debt financed

government policies market imperfections and foreign direct investment the internalization eclectic theory of foreign direct investment includes the important insight that government policies create market imperfections which make foreign direct investment an economically rational strategic alternative for firms this paper reexamines the effects of government policies on market imperfections and foreign direct investment fdi it broadens and refines the analysis of the impact of government policies by developing the following arguments 1 there is a wide range of government policies that affect firms fdi decisions via their effects on market imperfections 2 there are numerous dimensions of variability in government policies that need to be identified in order to understand fully the effects of government policies on market imperfections and hence fdi flows 3 some of the effects of government policies on market imperfections and fdi are the opposite of those previously noted in the fdi literature 4 the effects of government policies vary across the several individual components of fdi flows the paper thus examines the following variables and relationships more extensively and precisely than has the previous literature government policy variables as causal factors affecting fdi market imperfection variables as intervening factors in the causal connections between government policies and fdi and the multiple indicators of the various dimensions of fdi as dependent variables

entry by foreign firms in the united states under exchange rate uncertainty this paper tests the effects that real exchange rate fluctuations had on foreign direct investment into the united states during the 1980s using a sample of foreign investments in sixty one four digit sic u s wholesale industries this paper finds exchange rate volatility to be negatively correlated with the number of foreign investments that occur in these industries this negative effect is most pronounced for industries where sunk investments in physical and intangible assets are relatively high although exchange rate volatility deters investment from all countries its effect was most significant for investments by japanese companies copyright 1993 by mit press

strategic growth options we provide a strategic rationale for growth options under uncertainty and imperfect competition in a market with strategic competition investment confers a greater capability to take advantage of future growth opportunities this strategic advantage leads to the capture of a greater share of the market either by dissuading entry or by inducing competitors to make room for the stronger competitor as a result of this strategic effect payoffs are in a rough sense more convex than in the case of no investment in a growth option when the strategic advantage is strong increased uncertainty encourages investment in growth options higher uncertainty means more opportunity rather than simply larger risk if the strategic effect is weak the reverse is true on the other hand an increase in systematic risk discourages the acquisition of growth options our results contradict the view that volatility is a strong disincentive for investment

the reaction of household consumption to predictable changes in social security taxes the key implication of rational expectations and the basic life cycle permanent income hypothesis that predictable changes in income have no effect on the growth rate of consumption expenditures is examined this implication is important for understanding the effectiveness and optimal timing of fiscal policy the causes and propagation of business cycles and the effects of income fluctuations on the growth rate of the economy using household level consumption data from the consumer expenditure survey whether expenditures on nondurable goods increase contemporaneously with predictable changes in social security tax withholding is tested it is found that households do change their consumption expenditures in response to the predictable fluctuations in income induced by the social security tax system

the eclectic paradigm of international production a restatement and some possible extensions this article reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the eclectic paradigm of international production over the past decade and restates its main tenets the second part of the article considers a number of possible extensions of the paradigm and concludes by asserting that it remains a robust general framework for explaining and analysing not only the economic rationale of economic production but many organisational and impact issues in relation to mne activity as well

consumption and income seasonality in thailand many households in developing countries rely on seasonal agriculture for their incomes this paper investigates whether household consumption expenditure tracks income across seasons using data from thailand i contrast the seasonal consumption patterns of households with different seasonal income patterns and estimate the responsiveness of seasonal consumption to seasonal income i find little evidence that consumption tracks income over the course of the year the findings suggest that observed seasonal consumption patterns are the result of seasonal variations in preferences or prices common to all households rather than an inability of households to use savings behavior to smooth consumption

energy prices and investment over the business cycle abstract this paper develops a theoretical investment equation for the firm which explicitly includes the relationship between investment and the price of energy using intertemporal comparative statics we investigate how economic conditions affect that relationship in a two period model the net present value of the firm s cash inflows is maximized subject to constraints the resulting investment equation for the firm is summed over all firms to produce an aggregate investment equation by assuming that aggregate shocks do not affect every firm simultaneously we could investigate the effects of varying economic conditions on the relationship under study we find that energy price increases will retard aggregate real investment also this restraining impact will be greatest during boom periods and least during recessions further the impact of an energy price increase on aggregate investment diminishes as the level of energy prices increases we show that simple ols techniques are not appropriate for empirical estimation of the relationship between aggregate investment and energy price they could produce inconsistent results depending on the time period studied because of the business cycle effects a survey of corporations along product lines would be useful to test for such non linearity

do consumers react to anticipated income changes evidence from the alaska permanent fund a central implication of the life cycle permanentincome hypothesis lc pih is that consumers should not respond to predictable changes in their income to test this hypothesis a number of recent papers have exploited natural experiments to identify anticipated income changes in particular recent work by parker 1999 uses the change in after tax income due to the cap on earnings subject to the social security tax and a related paper by souleles 1999 examines the response of consumption to income tax refunds surprisingly parker and souleles find that even when income is expected to change within the year expenditure is excessively sensitive to the timing of the income change while their results can be interpreted as evidence that our canonical model of consumption is inadequate an alternative explanation is that the anticipated income changes they exploit are small and irregular and that households will not bother to change their consumption paths when the computational costs involved are large relative to the utility gains in support of this interpretation browning and collado 2001 find that the seasonal consumption patterns of spanish households that work in sectors that provide regular bonus payments do not differ from those of households that do not receive bonus payments this paper adds to this evidence by exploiting a natural experiment provided by annual payments from the state of alaska s permanent fund to every resident in the state of alaska that should yield an unusually powerful test of the lc pih these payments are large and clearly anticipated by alaskan residents using the variation in the size of the payments over time and in the amount received by families of different sizes to identify the response of consumption to payments from the permanent fund i find no evidence that the consumption of alaskan households reacts to these payments in addition i find no evidence that the seasonal pattern of consumption in alaska differs from that in the other 49 states or that households in alaska are subject to fewer liquidity constraints engage in less buffer stock saving or spend a smaller fraction of their income on semidurable goods than households in the rest of the united states however although households in alaska do not overreact to payments from the permanent fund i find that the consumption of the very same households is excessively sensitive to their income tax refunds this evidence suggest that households will take anticipated income changes into account in their consumption decisions when the income changes are large regular and easy to predict but will not do so when they are small and irregular the paper proceeds as follows the next section of the paper presents details on the department of economics princeton university princeton nj 08544 and national bureau of economic research e mail chsieh princeton edu i am very grateful to the bureau of labor statistics bls for providing access to the data from the consumer expenditure survey and to its staff particularly steven henderson walter vandeheide and wolf weber for their generous assistance during my visits to the bls i also thank nanci jones for providing data and patiently answering questions on the operation of the alaska permanent fund anne case angus deaton jonathan parker and two referees provided useful comments the views expressed in this paper are personal and should not be attributed to the bls 1 i refer to the certainty equivalent version of the lc pih or one in which the expected variance of consumption is constant as is well known without these assumptions the lc pih only implies smoothing of marginal utility not necessarily of consumption 2 see christina h paxson 1992 john shea 1995 jonathan a parker 1999 nicholas s souleles 1999 martin browning and m dolores collado 2001 also see ronald a bodkin 1959 for an early example of the use of a natural experiment to test for excess sensitivity for comprehensive reviews of the large literature on empirical tests of the lc pih see angus deaton 1992 browning and annamaria lusardi 1996 and browning and thomas f crossley 2001 3 in 1998 for example the permanent fund paid 1 541 to every resident of the state of alaska

on the investment uncertainty relationship in a real options model abstract it appears to be widely accepted in the real options literature that an increase in uncertainty should have an inhibiting effect on investment our article demonstrates that the notion of a negative uncertainty investment relationship is not always correct we show that in certain situations an increase in uncertainty can actually increase the probability of investing and thereby have a positive impact on investment

the relationship between oil prices and rig counts the importance of lags abstract this study deals with a timely and relevant issue in the oil market in the wake of the recent drastic drop in oil prices which is the relationship between changes in oil prices and changes in rig counts while accounting for other determinants of this relationship this relationship is of strong interest to analysts investors and policymakers in the united states and other countries we empirically verify the impact of changes in oil prices on rig counts which has lags up to one quarter this evidence is stable across time and over different linear and non linear models the analysis also suggests that the relationship is non linear which is verified by both the quantile regression and quantile on quantile models we find evidence of non linearity that has softened in the most recent years where the relationship between the variables has stabilized

who is credit constrained in the u s economy an important assumption of the life cycle model of consumption is the postulate of perfect capital markets this hypothesis has recently been challenged by substantial empirical evidence hall and mishkin 1982 using the panel study of income dynamics estimate that 20 percent of united states families are liquidity constrained mariger 1986 derives a life cycle model with endogenous liquidity constraints and using a cross section estimates this fraction to be 19 4 percent hubbard and judd 1986 simulate a model with a constraint on net worth which shows that with reasonable assumptions about preferences 19 0 percent of united states consumers are liquidity constrained the emerging consensus points therefore to a fraction of approximately 20 percent of the population behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the pure life cycle model in addition hayashi 1985 and zeldes 1989 investigate the correlation among consumption wealth and income for various population groups and infer that liquidity constraints are more important for younger families with low levels of wealth and saving the main limitation of these studies is that in their data sets constrained consumers are not observable and have to be identified via indirect evidence thus there is as yet little firm evidence about the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to be credit constrained this paper adopts an approach that differs from previous tests for liquidity constraints because it makes use of data where constrained consumers are observable and explicitly links their existence to credit market imperfections and personal characteristics the data drawn from the 1983 survey of consumer finances scf and described in section ii provide information on individuals whose request for credit has been rejected by financial intermediaries in section iii a model is developed in which consumers and lenders behavior jointly determines the probability that a consumer is rationed in the credit market this probability is then

balancing private and state ownership in emerging markets telecommunications infrastructure country industry and firm influences bargaining between host states and investors over the terms of investment in sensitive sectors of the economy generates political and economic tensions in this study we investigate the factors that contribute to the outcomes of those negotiations as measured by the private vs state owned share of newly consummated telecommunications infrastructure projects we find that private ownership is positively associated with overall economic development and investment liberalization in the host country and with greenfield vs divestiture and joint venture vs wholly owned projects private ownership is negatively associated with existing telecommunications infrastructure higher levels of state ownership of foreign investing firms and the technological sophistication of the projects our analysis also shows a curvilinear inverted u shaped relationship between investment policy hazards and private ownership this finding supports the insight from transaction cost economics that potential gains from internalization are greatest at intermediate levels of uncertainty

economic exposure and integrated risk management most corporate risk management research focuses on particular risk exposures to the exclusion of other interrelated exposures by contrast this study models corporate risk exposures using a multivariate approach integrating the distinct exposures of interest to finance international business and strategy researchers the paper addresses the implications of multivariate modeling for corporate risk management some key methodological issues arising in empirical estimation of corporate economic exposures and directions for research on integrated risk management 1998 john wiley sons ltd

beyond categorization new directions for theory development about entrepreneurial internationalization categorizations emphasizing the earliness of internationalization have long been a cornerstone of international entrepreneurship research here we contend that the prominence of categories has not been commensurate with theory development associated with them we draw on categorization theory to explain why earliness based categories are persistent and argue that a greater focus on notions related to opportunity can open new avenues of research about the entrepreneurial internationalization of business we propose and discuss three directions for opportunity based research on entrepreneurial internationalization involving context dynamics and variety

the multifaceted nature of exploration and exploitation value of supply demand and spatial search for innovation in this paper exploration and exploitation are conceptualized in terms of a nonlocal local search continuum in three dimensional supply demand and geographic space using cross sectional data from a wide range of manufacturing industries we develop and validate an operational measure of the exploration exploitation concept in line with theory based arguments our analysis suggests that the value of supply side demand side and spatial exploration and exploitation is contingent on the environment while boundary spanning supply side search is found to be positively associated with innovation in more dynamic environments typical of the entrepreneurial regime phase of technology evolution such exploration appears to hurt innovation in less dynamic environments in a reverse fashion while boundary spanning demand side search is found to be favorably associated with innovation in less dynamic environments it appears to harm innovation in a more dynamic context interestingly spatial boundary spanning search seems to contribute to innovation in more as well as less dynamic environments with the caveat that the substantive findings of this study are based on cross sectional data we discuss the implications of our work and future research directions

union contracts and the life cycle permanent income hypothesis this paper isolates households in the psid whose heads can be matched to particular long term union contracts with high confidence the author uses use published information on these contracts to construct a household specific measure of expected wage growth he finds that predictable wage movements are significantly correlated with consumption changes contrary to neoclassical consumption theory the author finds that consumption responds more strongly to predictable income declines than to predictable income increases this asymmetry is inconsistent with liquidity constraints and myopia but is qualitatively consistent with models in which preferences exhibit loss aversion copyright 1995 by american economic association

the reaction of consumer spending and debt to tax rebates evidence from consumer credit data we use a new panel data set of credit card accounts to analyze how consumers responded to the 2001 federal income tax rebates we estimate the monthly response of credit card payments spending and debt exploiting the unique randomized timing of the rebate disbursement we find that on average consumers initially saved some of the rebate by increasing their credit card payments and thereby paying down debt but soon afterward their spending increased counter to the permanent income model spending rose most for consumers who were initially most likely to be liquidity constrained whereas debt declined most so saving rose most for unconstrained consumers

the effect of noncontributory pensions on saving in mexico this paper examines the effects of non contributory pension programs at the federal and state levels on mexican households saving patterns using micro data from the mexican income and expenditure survey the federal program by itself appears to reduce the saving rate of households whose oldest member is either 18 to 54 or 65 to 69 state programs by themselves have no significant effects on household saving rates in the smallest localities but in larger localities they may reduce the saving of households with members in their sixties the combination of both types of programs generally does not have statistically significant effects on households aggregate saving probably because each program seems to affect different population strata no significant effects are found for households whose oldest member is age eligible 70 and older within specific investment categories evidence is found of increases in human capital and in durable and financial goods for some age groups finally the paper provides evidence on household level labor supply responses

the effect of national culture on the choice of entry mode characteristics of national cultures have frequently been claimed to influence the selection of entry modes this article investigates this claim by developing a theoretical argument for why culture should influence the choice of entry two hypotheses are derived which relate culture to entry mode choice one focusing on the cultural distance between countries the other on attitudes towards uncertainty avoidance using a multinomial logit model and controlling for other effects the hypotheses are tested by analysing data on 228 entries into the united states market by acquisition wholly owned greenfield and joint venture empirical support for the effect of national culture on entry choice is found

oil curse economic growth and trade openness an important economic paradox in the economic literature is that countries with abundant natural resources are poor in terms of real gross domestic product per capita this paradox known as the resource curse is contrary to the conventional intuition that natural resources help to improve economic growth and prosperity using panel data for 95 countries this study revisits the resource curse paradox in terms of oil resources abundance for the period 1980 2017 in addition the study examines the role of trade openness in influencing the relationship between oil abundance and economic growth the study finds trade openness is a possible avenue to reduce the resource curse in our sample trade openness reduces oil curse by around 25 trade openness allows countries to obtain competitive prices for their resources in the international market and access advanced technologies to extract resources more efficiently therefore natural resource rich economies can reduce the resource curse by increasing exposure to international trade

oil price uncertainty in canada bernanke bernanke ben s irreversibility uncertainty and cyclical investment quarterly journal of economics 98 1983 85 106 shows how uncertainty about energy prices may induce optimizing firms to postpone investment decisions thereby leading to a decline in aggregate output elder and serletis elder john and serletis apostolos oil price uncertainty http ssrn com abstract 908675 2009 find empirical evidence that uncertainty about oil prices has tended to depress investment in the united states in this paper we assess the robustness of these results by investigating the effects of oil price uncertainty in canada our results are remarkably similar to existing results for the united states providing additional evidence that uncertainty about oil prices may provide another explanation for why the sharp oil price declines of 1985 failed to produce rapid output growth impulse response analysis suggests that uncertainty about oil prices may tend to reinforce the negative response of output to positive oil shocks

large company capital formation and effects of market share turbulence micro data evidence from the pims database the possible effect of demand uncertainty on company investment decisions is investigated at the micro level a standard investment function is employed and modified to incorporate demand uncertainty the data comes from the pims data base on business units of large firms in concentrated markets in dynamic panel data estimation significance was found for a variable representing market share turbulence in a number of industries this variable causes a depressing effect on capital investment either on its own or in combination with indicators of vertical integration which indicate insulation from demand uncertainty the results constitute some of the best available evidence that demand uncertainty constraints capital investment

mimetic and experiential effects in international marketing alliance formations of us pharmaceuticals firms an event history analysis alliances are recognized as an indispensable tool for managers operating in a global business environment and as a fundamental stage of the internationalization process of the firm drawing on a co evolutionary framework this article investigates the mimetic and experiential effects in international alliance formation we focus on a critical unresolved issue in the literature what is the role of mimetic behavior and previous alliance experience in mitigating the uncertainty associated with engaging in cross border operations an event history analysis of 792 international marketing alliance formations initiated by 317 firms in the us pharmaceutical industry is employed to test the hypotheses the findings of two different hazard rate models reveal significant complex effects of density and cross border alliance experience on the propensity to engage in new international marketing alliances

investment in manufacturing exchange rates and external exposure abstract this paper introduces a new measure of external exposure which emphasizes exposure to external markets both through export sales and imported inputs into production and uses this measure to explore the linkage between exchange rates and investment in us industry on average manufacturing sectors have evolved to being primarily import exposed by the early 1980s in low price over cost markup sectors markups are relatively unresponsive to exchange rate changes whereas sectoral investment patterns are strongly affected by contrast high markup industries absorb much of the exchange rate fluctuations in markups and pass relatively little through to real investment

on the sign of the investment uncertainty relationship understanding the effects of uncertainty over any decision variable has fascinated economists for a long time risk aversion and incomplete markets are likely to make the investment uncertainty relationship negative e g roger craine 1989 joseph zeira 1989 what happens in the absence of risk aversion and incomplete markets is however ambiguous richard hartman 1972 and andrew b abel 1983 1984 1985 found that in the presence of symmetric convex costs of adjustment mean preserving increases in price uncertainty raise investment of a competitive firm as long as the profit function is convex in prices on the other hand the recent literature on irreversible investment e g robert s pindyck 1988 giuseppe bertola 1988 has shown that increases in uncertainty lower investment all these results have been derived under either risk neutrality or complete markets intuition suggests that the explanation for such a difference lies with the asymmetric nature of adjustment costs in the irreversible investment case as compared with the symmetry of the adjustment cost mechanisms proposed by abel and hartman although this intuition is confirmed in this paper asymmetric adjustment costs are shown not to be sufficient to explain why the results differ in fact a more hidden but at least as important difference between these two literatures is that the former assumes perfect competition and constant returns to scale whereas the latter assumes either imperfect competition or decreasing returns to scale or both 2 the purpose of this paper is to highlight the role of the decreasing marginal return to capital assumption due to either imperfect competition or decreasing returns to scale or both in determining the effects of adjustment cost asymmetries on the sign of the response of investment to changes in uncertainty under risk neutrality for this the paper develops a simple model with a cost of adjustment mechanism general enough to consider both symmetric convexity and irreversibility as special cases one of the most important findings is the lack of robustness of the negative relationship between investment and uncertainty under asymmetric adjustment costs3 to changes in the degree of competition in fact when firms are nearly competitive the conclusion of hartman and of abel holds no matter how asymmetric adjustment costs are studying adjustment cost mechanisms has a central role in understanding the dynamics of investment and its business cycle implications but conclusive results about the sign of the instantaneous relationship between uncertainty and investment should not be department of economics columbia university new york ny 10027 i am grateful to giuseppe bertola prajit dutta glen hubbard anil kashyap richard lyons and the referees for their useful comments 1the financial literature on investment has considered risk aversion through a premium in the discount rate determined by the capm capital asset pricing model intertemporal capm or consumption capm however often this discount rate is left unchanged when studying the response of investment to uncertainty changes e g pindyck 1988 pp 974 5 thereby omitting the effect of changes in uncertainty on investment due to risk aversion and incomplete markets 2in the typical version of the irreversible investment problem there is no cost of upward adjustments thus imperfect competition and or decreasing returns to scale are required to bound the size of the firm 3in this paper asymmetric adjustment cost refers to the case in which it is more expensive to adjust downward than upward certainly the opposite case is a trivial extension of the case studied in this paper

is there a daily discount rate evidence from the food stamp nutrition cycle abstract quasi hyperbolic discounting predicts impatience over short run tradeoffs i present a direct non laboratory test of this implication using data on the nutritional intake of food stamp recipients caloric intake declines by 10 to 15 percent over the food stamp month implying a significant preference for immediate consumption these findings constitute a rejection of the permanent income hypothesis and are extremely difficult to reconcile with exponential discounting the data support an explanation based on time preference and reject several alternative explanations including highly elastic intertemporal substitution i explore implications for the optimal timing of transfer payments under alternative assumptions about preferences

exchange rates and investment in united states industry the path of the dollar has significantly influenced investment activity in u s industry the effects of both exchange rate levels and exchange rate volatility have been more pronounced in the 1980s than in the 1970s although aggregate investment data mask some of these relationships the effects of exchange rates on investment are most pronounced in the disaggregate data for manufacturing durable goods sectors and nonmanufacturing sectors these relationships also have changed over time in contrast to the conventional wisdom in the 1980s real dollar depreciations appreciations were likely to be associated with investment contractions expansions copyright 1993 by mit press

reverse globalization does high oil price volatility discourage international trade this paper examines whether higher oil price volatility causes a reversal in globalization using a large annual panel data set covering 84 countries all over the world from 1984 to 2008 we investigate the impacts of oil price fluctuations on international trade namely exports and imports we present strong and robust evidence that international trade flows will be lower when oil prices fluctuate significantly we therefore conclude that oil price volatility hurts globalization

paycheque receipt and the timing of consumption this article examines the consumption response to monthly paycheque receipt since the amount and arrival date of paycheques are known in advance the receipt of a paycheque does not coincide with the receipt of new information under the basic rational expectations life cycle permanent income hypothesis household consumption should not respond to paycheque arrival using data from the uk s family expenditure survey this article finds that household consumption is excessively sensitive to paycheque receipt the results cannot be explained by any underlying monthly expenditure fluctuations common to all households the presence of liquidity constraints as measured by wealth and age can account for the excess sensitivity results

the effects of government transfers on monthly cycles in drug abuse hospitalization and mortality this paper analyzes the monthly patterns of adverse outcomes due to the consumption of illegal drugs by recipients of government transfer payments we find evidence that certain subpopulations on government cash aid significantly increase their consumption of drugs when their checks arrive at the beginning of the month and as a result experience adverse events including hospitalization and death using data from california we find that the overall rate of drug related hospital admissions increases abruptly at the beginning of the month with admissions increasing 23 during the first five days of the month we find that this cycle is driven largely by recipients of supplemental security income ssi ssi recipients also experience an abrupt 22 increase in within hospital mortality after receiving their checks these findings suggest that full wallets adversely affect some aid recipients and that policymakers should explore alternate disbursement regimes such as a staggered disbursement schedule or in kind support that have the potential to reduce the rate of adverse events

consumption smoothing and frequency of benefit payments of cash transfer programs we examine the extent of consumption smoothing between the receipt of benefits by households after the introduction of two non contributory pension programs in the state of yucatan mexico

investment and uncertainty in the international oil and gas industry abstract the standard theory of irreversible investments and real options suggests a negative relation between investment and uncertainty richer models with compound option structures open for a positive relationship this paper presents a micro econometric study of corporate investment and uncertainty in a period of market turbulence and restructuring in the international oil and gas industry based on data for 115 companies over the period 1992 2005 we estimate four different specifications of the q model of investment with robust results for the uncertainty variables the estimated models suggest that macroeconomic uncertainty creates a bottleneck for oil and gas investment and production whereas industry specific uncertainty has a stimulating effect

oil shocks competition and corporate investment evidence from china abstract this paper aims to investigate the impact of three classical oil shocks on the chinese corporate investment by using firm level data moreover we assess the role of product market competition in the relationship between oil shocks and corporate investment our empirical results show that oil aggregate demand and specific demand shocks negatively affect corporate investment while oil supply shocks show a positive effect notably compared to the non energy related industry the corporate investment of energy related industry is more sensitive to these oil shocks furthermore we find high competitive pressure can mitigate the impact of oil specific demand shocks on the corporate investment of energy related industry but competition presents a limited effect on the relationship between other oil shocks and corporate investment

political aspects of mne theory political behavior by mnes has usually been ignored downplayed or passively treated in dominant economic models of the multinational enterprise in order to remedy this lacuna dunning s eclectic paradigm is expanded to integrate political dimensions in the analysis of ownership internalization and location advantages

a critical assessment of the eclectic theory of the multinational enterprise the paper critically deals with the electric theory of the multinational enterprise it examines firstly the theoretical redundancy of the ownership advantage secondly the inseparability of the ownership advantage from the location advantage thirdly the conceptual ambiguity of the location advantage and lastly possible methodological dangers of a multi factor analysis under the three headings of the eclectic theory

firm ownership preferences and host government restrictions an integrated approach two approaches may explain how multinational enterprises mnes select ownership structures for subsidiaries the first argues that mnes prefer structures that minimize that transaction costs of doing business abroad the second argues that ownership structures are determined by negotiations with host governments whose outcomes depend on the bargaining power of the firm this paper presents a framework integrating these two approaches and uses statistical methods to separate their effects empirically

income timing and liquidity constraints evidence from a randomized field experiment abstract people in developing countries sometimes desire deferred income streams which replace more frequent income flows with a single later lump sum we study the effects of short term wage deferral using a randomized experiment with participants in a temporary cash for work program workers who are assigned to lump sum payments are five percentage points more likely to purchase a high return investment we discuss the role of both barriers to saving and credit constraints in explaining our results while stated preferences for deferred payments suggest a role for savings constraints the evidence is also consistent with a simpler model of credit constraints alone

international expansion of telecommunication carriers the influence of market structure network characteristics and entry imperfections this paper examines the internationalization process of telecommunication carriers in this industry early entrants gain substantial first mover advantages due to the transient nature of the windows of market opportunity and the potential to influence the regulatory process as an incumbent to capture these strategic and economic advantages firms follow a strategy of preemption both of markets and partners the authors argue for the need to augment prevailing theory with contextual idiosyncrasies that characterize specific industries

do managers behave the way theory suggests a choice theoretic examination of foreign direct investment location decision making many empirical examinations of foreign direct investment location choice have relied on the use of secondary data and surveys on the choices made by firms about the form and location of overseas investment these studies have two inherent and related problems first they rely solely on the location choices made by different firms and assume that the domains of possible options considered were the same second there is an assumption about the rules used by firms to make these decisions yet the decisions are made by boundedly rational managers after reviewing the literature this study examines managers choices about foreign investment location through the use of structured experimentation the results show that in creating sets of investments to consider managers appear to follow fairly rational rules however the choice of actual investments appears less aligned to traditional models

permanent income current income and consumption evidence from two panel data sets in this article i estimate euler equations that is the first order conditions of the consumers maximization problem using data from two data sets consumption data are taken from the consumer expenditure survey income data are taken from the panel study of income dynamics because the data for the estimation come from two samples i use a generalization of the instrumental variables estimator the two sample instrumental variables estimator i find evidence that consumption is excessively sensitive to predictable income growth the estimates of the coefficient of excess sensitivity for three consumption measures range from 2 to 5

can environmental sustainability be used to manage energy price risk energy security issues and climate change are two of the most pressing problems facing society and both of these problems are likely to increase energy price variability in the coming years this paper develops and estimates a model of a company s energy price exposure and presents evidence showing that increases in a company s environmental sustainability lowers its energy price exposure this result is robust across two different measures of energy prices these results should be useful to companies seeking new ways of addressing energy price risk as well as governments concerned about the impact that energy price risk can have on economic growth and prosperity

investment and demand uncertainty this paper investigates the effects of uncertainty on the investment decisions of a sample of italian manufacturing firms using information on the subjective probability distribution of future demand for firms products according to the entrepreneurs the results support the view that uncertainty weakens the response of investment to demand thus slowing down capital accumulation consistent with the predictions of the theory there is considerable heterogeneity in the effect of uncertainty on investment it is stronger for firms that cannot easily reverse investment decisions and for those with substantial market power we show that the negative effect of uncertainty on investment cannot be explained by uncertainty proxying for liquidity constraints

speculative trading and oil price dynamic a study of the wti market abstract the aim of this paper is to study the oil price dynamic in west texas intermediate wti market in the us by using statistical and econometric tools we first attempt to identify the long term relationship between wti spot prices and the prices of futures contracts on the new york mercantile exchange nymex subsequently we model the short term dynamic between these two prices and this analysis points up several breaks on this basis a short term markov switching vectorial error correction model ms vecm with two distinct states standard state and crisis state has been estimated finally we introduce the volumes of transactions observed on the nymex for the wti contracts and we estimate the influence of the non commercial players we conclude that the hypothesis of an influence of non commercial players on the probability for being in the crisis state cannot be rejected in addition we show that the rise in liquidity of the first financial contracts as measured by the volume of open interest is a key element to understand the dynamics in market prices

on the internationalization process of firms a critical analysis even though international marketing has been challenged because of theoretical and methodological shortcomings very few researchers have actually attempted to analyze the weaknesses based on principles of theory evaluation in this article the author examines two types of models addressing the individual firm s internationalization process a theory evaluation is performed based on the explanation and the falsification criteria in order to improve the internationalization models some measures are proposed

international oil price uncertainty and corporate investment evidence from china s emerging and transition economy we develop and estimate a dynamic model of investment to investigate the impact of international oil price uncertainty on corporate investment expenditures in china s emerging and transition economy we further examine whether state ownership affects the relationship between oil price uncertainty and corporate investment consistent with the model s prediction the main finding is that oil price uncertainty exerts a negative impact on corporate investment expenditures in addition compared with state owned listed companies the negative influence of oil price uncertainty on corporate investment is more significant for non state owned listed companies our further analysis using the market oriented reform of refined oil pricing in 2008 as a quasi natural event shows the variation between the low degree marketization period and the high degree one in terms of the relationship between international oil price uncertainty state ownership and corporate investment expenditures

the response of household consumption to income tax refunds a central implication of the life cycle or permanent income theory is that consumption should not respond to predictable fluctuations in income tests of this implication have yielded mixed results especially on micro data angus deaton 1992 martin browning and annamaria lusardi 1996 in large part this might be due to the difficulties of isolating the predictable component of income at the micro level most tests proceed by instrumenting for income but since the available instruments are typically poor such tests might be prejudiced against finding significant excess sensitivity of consumption to income john shea 1995 also it is not clear how closely the resulting econometric predictions of income coincide with agents actual expectations of income to avoid these difficulties this paper examines the response of household consumption to a particular type of income that is both predictable and transitory income tax refunds since a refund depends on events in the previous calendar year it is predictable income as regards consumption in the year of its receipt consequently under the life cycle theory consumption should not increase on receipt of a refund 2 in addition to testing the canonical model of consumption this paper provides estimates interpretable as the marginal propensity to consume mpc out of refunds since federal tax refunds now amount to over 80 billion per year averaging well over 1 000 per refund these estimates are of interest in themselves more generally they bear on the impact of even preannounced and temporary changes in fiscal policy the paper begins by surveying related studies in section i section ii describes the data the consumer expenditure survey cex which of the leading u s micro data sets has the most comprehensive coverage of expenditure the empirical specification is set out in section hi section iv reports the results and section v concludes

price trends and volatility scenarios for designing forest sector transformation abstract potential scenarios for the forest bioeconomy are heavily reliant on price assumptions in particular any abrupt changes in prices have a profound impact on the relevancy of any sector analysis the objective of this paper was to demonstrate a new forest sector approach for incorporating price uncertainties in order to improve our assessment of investment decision making alternatives methodologically we linked a multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model mgarch 1 1 with three global land use scenarios that are of strategic importance to the forest bioeconomy the three scenarios were formulated as i a business as usual scenario ii a high biomass usage scenario and iii a no growth scenario our results indicate an upward trend in prices over time for all three scenarios and for most woody biomass commodities under all scenarios price volatility in the forest sector would be smaller than that for the fossil fuel energy i e oil and natural gas price volatilities from fossil fuel markets are positively influencing woody biomass price volatility and positively influencing pulp volatility these results are discussed in the context of a case study describing investment alternatives for a district heating facility with options for woody biomass natural gas or heating oil

volatility spillovers and cross hedging between gold oil and equities evidence from the gulf cooperation council countries the paper examines the return and volatility spillovers between crude oil gold and equities and investigates the usefulness of the two commodities in hedging equity portfolios using daily data from january 20043 to may 2016 for the gulf cooperation council countries a dcc garch model is used to estimate dynamic correlations and hedge ratios we find significant spillovers from oil to equities highlighting the heavy dependence of the local economies on oil moreover the spillovers of gold on the stock markets are insignificant suggesting that gold price fluctuations do not necessarily influence equity investment decisions in the opposite direction we find that equities do not exert significant influence on the two commodities which we attribute to the relatively small capitalisation of the exchanges our results reveal low dynamic correlations and hedge ratios with a few spikes during crises indicating that oil and gold are cheap hedges for stocks albeit not good ones while they could be considered as weak safe havens but at a considerable cost

the sensitivity of tests of the intertemporal allocation of consumption to near rational alternatives suppose a consumer sets consumption equal to income each period rather than following the optimal permanent income decision rule how much utility does he lose this paper finds that the answer is typically less than 10 cents 1 per quarter in environments specified by popular tests on aggregate data it includes calculations of the costs of excess sensitivity and excess smoothness to income and interest rate changes and the costs of ignoring information it concludes that the theory does not make predictions for aggregate tests that are robust to small costs such as information or transactions copyright 1989 by american economic association

assessing the impact of oil prices on firms of different sizes its tough being in the middle recent empirical research has found evidence of a relationship between oil price movements and stock prices most published research investigates the relationship between oil price movements and stock prices using either economy wide measures of stock prices or industry sector measures of stock prices an important question that has largely gone unanswered relates to the relationship between oil prices and stock prices when the size of firms is allowed to vary relative to large firms do oil price movements have larger or smaller impacts on the stock prices of small or medium sized firms the answer to this question could have important policy implications that affect economic growth and prosperity in this paper a panel of firms is followed over a 17 year period to investigate the relationship between oil price movements firm size and stock prices evidence is found that shows the relationship between oil price movements and stock prices does vary with firm size and the relationship is strongest for medium sized firms

crude oil price uncertainty and corporate investment new global evidence abstract using a comprehensive dataset of more than 33 000 firms from 54 countries in the period 1984 2015 we show that crude oil price uncertainty negatively influences corporate investment more importantly the effect is dependent on the market and stock characteristics of the firms in addition we discover that the effect is stronger in the crude oil producers group than for crude consumers our analysis reveals that the global financial crisis and market volatility phases significantly affect this relationship our results survive a range of robustness tests

who feels the calorie crunch and when the impact of school meals on cyclical food insecurity abstract monthly welfare programs such as the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap produce consistent cycles of expenditure and consumption among recipients food insecurity health status crime poor behavior and test scores track these cycles this paper leverages new data from the usda the foodaps survey to better understand these cycles in three ways first i find that expenditure and consumption cycles are correlated within households a fact not previously established second i study diet quality over the benefit month and find that it worsens potentially compounding the harmful consequences of cyclical food insecurity third i find that kids bear less of the burden of the consumption cycle than adults and that much of this difference may be driven by school meal programs this finding suggests large potential gains in child welfare from expanding summer meal programs

what do we know about investment under uncertainty recent theoretical developments relating to investment under uncertainty have highlighted the importance of irreversibility for the timing of investment expenditures and their expected returns this has subsequently stimulated a growing empirical literature which examines uncertainty and threshold effects on investment behaviour this paper presents a review of this literature a variety of methods have been used to investigate the empirical implication of irreversibility in investment the majority focusing on the relationship between investment flows and proxy measures of uncertainty a general conclusion is that increased uncertainty at both aggregate and disaggregate levels leads to lower investment rates this suggests that there is an irreversibility effect under which greater uncertainty raises the value of the call option to delay a commitment to investment this effect appears to dominate any positive impact on investment arising from the fact that greater uncertability under certain circumstances increases the marginal profitability of capital the methods used raise a number of issues which call into question the reliability of the findings and these are addressed in the paper however if such irreversibility effects are present then their omission from traditional investment models casts doubt on the efficacy of such specifications jel classification d81 d92 e22

the linkages between oil market uncertainty and islamic stock markets evidence from quantile on quantile approach abstract in recent years islamic finance has become increasingly influential especially islamic stocks which have created huge investment attractiveness at the same time the financialization of oil has made the international oil market increasingly uncertain and more likely to affect other markets to effectively understand the correlation between the two markets we empirically analyze the cases of four typical countries from the perspective of oil market uncertainty this paper utilizes ovx as an accurate measure of oil market uncertainty and applies quantile on quantile approach to detect the asymmetric and heterogeneous relations between the variables our results show overall negative linkages between ovx changes and islamic stock returns and there is indeed asymmetry namely the effects of oil market uncertainty will be more pronounced when it is at higher quantiles further comparing the results of the selected four countries we find some heterogeneities oil importing countries are more sensitive than oil exporting countries and islamic countries are more sensitive than non islamic countries the findings of this article about the linkages between oil market uncertainty and islamic stock markets is meaningful to the research and financial practice in related fields

3rd of tha month do social security recipients smooth consumption between checks this paper examines the response of consumption expenditures to the monthly receipt of social security checks since the amount and arrival date of these checks are known to the recipients the basic life cycle permanent income hypothesis lcpih predicts that consumption should not respond to the receipt of these checks using daily diary data from the consumer expenditure survey this paper finds evidence that both the dollar amount and probability of expenditures increase immediately following the receipt of this check most relevant to testing the lcpih categories of instantaneous consumption expenditure such as food away from home increase on the check arrival date the response is found primarily amongst households for whom social security is the primary source of income however the magnitude of the estimated responses are relatively small and do not suggest that the utility losses are large from this non smoothing behavior this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a review of research on the growth of multinational enterprises a penrosean lens abstract we provide a comprehensive review of the growth of multinational enterprises mnes based on a quarter century 25 years of scholarly international business publications we synthesize research insights on the determinants of the growth of mnes through the lens of penrose s theory of firm growth which is the most influential theoretical perspective on firm growth the review takes stock of the research findings on the facilitators constraints and the trajectory of growth of mnes and elaborates on the commonalities and differences between research on the growth of mnes that draws on penrose s theory and research that does not this comparison highlights the opportunity to build an internally coherent theory of the growth of mnes that is a theory that connects what an mne is to what determines an mne s growth it also indicates that past research placed a strong emphasis on exogenous factors e g cross country distances as key constraints on growth even though the penrosean lens suggests a close consideration of endogenous factors that drive international growth as well as endogenizing the ostensibly exogenous growth determinants the review highlights the importance of firm specific managerial knowledge and learning which shapes the direction of the growth of mnes and ensures its administrative coherence