This paper presents a dynamic model of the industrial demands for structures, equipment, and blue- and white-collar labor. Our approach is consistent with producers holding rational expectations and optimizing dynamically in the presence of adjustment costs, yet it permits generality of...

I study irreversible investment decisions when projects take time to complete, and are subject to two types of uncertainty over the cost of completion. The first is technical uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty over the amount of time, effort, and materials that will ultimately be required to...

The regulation of telecommunications, railroads, and other network industries has been based on mandatory unbundling and facilities sharing - entrants have the option to lease part or all of incumbents' facilities if and when they desire, at rates determined by regulators. This flexibility is of...

The present value model relates an asset's price to the sum of its discounted expected future payoffs. I explore the limits of the model by testing its ability to explain the pricing of storable commodities. For commodities the payoff stream is the convenience yield that accrues from holding...

Any economic analysis of climate change policy requires some model that describes the impact of warming on future GDP and consumption. Most integrated assessment models (IAMs) relate temperature to the level of real GDP and consumption, but there are theoretical and empirical reasons to expect...

Climate policy is complicated by the considerable compounded uncertainties over the costs and benefits of abatement. We don't even know the probability distributions for future temperatures and impacts, making cost-benefit analysis based on expected values challenging to say the least. There are...

The idea that wages rise relative to alternatives as job seniority accumulates is the foundation of the theory of specific human capital, as well as other widely accepted theories of compensation. The fact that persons with longer job tenures typically earn higher wages tends to support these...

Most investment expenditures have two important characteristics: First, they are largely irreversible; the firm cannot disinvest, so the expenditures are sunk costs. Second, they can be delayed, allowing the firm to wait for new information about prices, costs, and other market conditions before...

How likely is a catastrophic event that would substantially reduce the capital stock, GDP and wealth? How much should society be willing to pay to reduce the probability or impact of a catastrophe? We answer these questions and provide a framework for policy analysis using a general equilibrium...

We re-examine the basic investment problem of deciding when to incur a sunk cost to obtain a stochastically fluctuating benefit. The optimal investment rule satisfies a trade-off between a larger versus a later net benefit; we show that this trade-off is closely analogous to the standard...