Empire-building by managers implies that they use a lower effective discount rate in making investment decisions. We use actual investment decisions to measure the gap between the manager’s effective discount rate and the market rate. Our empirical work is based on panel data for 193 Canadian...

By studying the gap between the discount rates used by executives and shareholders, we assess the extent to which governance problems distort firm behavior. The estimation strategy recovers discount rates used by executives from the pattern of their actual investment spending. Our empirical work...

When investment is irreversible, theory suggests that firms will be “reluctant to invest.” This reluctance creates a wedge between the discount rate guiding investment decisions and the standard Jorgensonian user cost (adjusted for risk). We use the intertemporal tradeoff between the...

Is real investment fully determined by fundamentals or is it sometimes affected by stock market misvaluation? We introduce three new tests that: measure the reaction of investment to sales shocks for firms that may be overvalued; use Fama-MacBeth regressions to determine whether "overinvestment"...

A new theoretical literature has suggested that the Modigliani-Miller theorem may not hold under imperfect information and that liquidity may affect a firm's investment spending. This paper provides three original tests for such capital market imperfections based on predicted differences in...

This paper examines the farm and small business LCGE. Our results of the farm LCGE provide only a partial support to the notion that it meets the special retirement needs of farmers. A large majority of the beneficiaries have income sources other than farming; however, many of them are near...

This paper explores two very different models which might account for stock market crashes. A key innovative feature of our paper is that we use the models to show how their implications for stock market crashes may be tested using switching-regression econometrics. We are careful to show that...

Economic theory predicts a negative relationship between inventories and the real interest rate, but previous empirical studies (mostly based on the older stock adjustment model) have found little evidence of such a relationship. We derive parametric tests for the role of the interest rate in...