We present evidence that an increase in investment as a share of GDP predicts a higher growth rate of output per worker, not only temporarily, but also in the steady state. These results are found using pooled annual data for a large panel of countries, using pooled data for non-overlapping...

Evidence that cash flow has a significant effect on company investment spending, after controlling for Tobin's average Q, has often been interpreted as suggesting the importance of financing constraints. Recent work on measurement error in the Q model casts doubt on this interpretation. It is...

This paper provides a discussion of stamp duty and its effects. This is followed by an empirical study using changes in the rate of stamp duty in the UK as natural experiments. Because shares will be affected differently depending on how frequently they are traded, we can employ a...

This chapter reviews developments to improve on the poor performance of the standard GMM estimator for highly autoregressive panel series. It considers the use of the system GMM estimator that relies on relatively mild restrictions on the initial condition process. This system GMM estimator...

This paper tests for the importance of cash flow on investment in fixed capital and R&D using firm-level panel data in two countries between 1985 and 1994. For German firms, cash flow is not informative in simple econometric models of fixed investment or R&D. In identical pecifications for...

We consider the estimation of Cobb-Douglas production functions using panel data covering a large sample of companies observed for a small number of time periods. Standard GMM estimators, which eliminate unobserved firm-specific effects by taking first differences, have been found to produce...

In this paper we explore a new approach to estimation for autoregressive panel data models, based on projecting the unobserved individual effects on the vector of observations on the lagged dependent variable. This approach yields estimators which coincide with known generalised method of...

Traditional analysis of the taxation of income from capital has focused on the impact of tax on marginal investment decisions; the principal impact of tax on investment is through the cost of capital, and is generally measured by an effective marginal tax rate. In this paper, we consider cases...

This paper examines a two-way interaction between trade liberalization and economic growth. Through dynamic increasing returns to specialization, international trade can increase world growth rates. But growth, through specialization , alters patterns of comparative advantage, changing the...

Theoretical work has emphasised the potential powerful impact of corporation tax asymmetries on investment behavior. Empirical work has been confined, however, to the essentially descriptive task of measuring implied effective tax rates. This paper uses panel data from 597 UK companies for...