IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ums/papers/2017-03.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Old and new formulations of the neoclassical theory of aggregate investment : a critical review

Author

Listed:
  • Daniele Girardi

    (Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

Abstract

This paper surveys the neoclassical theory of aggregate investment and its criticisms. We distinguish four main formulations of this theory: the traditional Wicksellian investment function; the Fisherian array-of-opportunities approach (as Witte Jr. called it); the Jorgensonian model; the now prevailing adjustment-costs models. With respect to other papers criticizing the neoclassical theory of investment, we do not appeal to market imperfections. We instead argue that all four formulations present serious theoretical difficulties, even conceding free competition.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniele Girardi, 2017. "Old and new formulations of the neoclassical theory of aggregate investment : a critical review," UMASS Amherst Economics Working Papers 2017-03, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ums:papers:2017-03
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.umass.edu/economics/publications/2017-03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Chirinko, Robert S, 1993. "Business Fixed Investment Spending: Modeling Strategies, Empirical Results, and Policy Implications," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 31(4), pages 1875-1911, December.
    2. Robert S. Chirinko, 1992. "Business Fixed Investment Spending: A Critical survey of Modeling Strategies, Empirical Results, and Policy Implications," Working Papers 9213, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago.
    3. Kenneth J. Arrow, B. Douglas Bernheim, Martin S. Feldstein, Daniel L. McFadden, James M. Poterba, y Robert M. Solow, 2011. "100 años de la American Economic Review: los 20 artículos más destacados," Revista de Economía Institucional, Universidad Externado de Colombia - Facultad de Economía, vol. 13(25), pages 349-358, July-Dece.
    4. Zonghie Han & Bertram Schefold, 2006. "An empirical investigation of paradoxes: reswitching and reverse capital deepening in capital theory," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 30(5), pages 737-765, September.
    5. Dale Jorgenson, 1967. "The Theory of Investment Behavior," NBER Chapters, in: Determinants of Investment Behavior, pages 129-175, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Bernanke, Ben & Bohn, Henning & Reiss, Peter C., 1988. "Alternative non-nested specification tests of time-series investment models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 293-326, March.
    7. Ruediger Bachmann & Eduardo Engel & Ricardo Caballero, 2006. "Lumpy Investment in Dynamic General Equilibrium," 2006 Meeting Papers 775, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    8. Julia K. Thomas, 2002. "Is Lumpy Investment Relevant for the Business Cycle?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 110(3), pages 508-534, June.
    9. Nerlove, Marc, 1972. "Lags in Economic Behavior," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 40(2), pages 221-251, March.
    10. Eisner, Robert, 1970. "Tax Policy and Investment Behavior: Further Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 60(4), pages 746-752, September.
    11. Daniel S. Hamermesh & Gerard A. Pfann, 1996. "Adjustment Costs in Factor Demand," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(3), pages 1264-1292, September.
    12. Chirinko, Robert S. & Fazzari, Steven M. & Meyer, Andrew P., 1999. "How responsive is business capital formation to its user cost?: An exploration with micro data," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 53-80, October.
    13. Kurz,Heinz D. & Salvadori,Neri, 1997. "Theory of Production," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521588676, January.
    14. Paul A. Samuelson, 1966. "A Summing Up," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 80(4), pages 568-583.
    15. Steven M. Fazzari, "undated". "The Investment-Finance Link, Investment and U.S. Fiscal Policy in the 1990s," Economics Public Policy Brief Archive 9, Levy Economics Institute.
    16. Fabio Petri, 2004. "General Equilibrium, Capital and Macroeconomics," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 3438.
    17. Hayashi, Fumio, 1982. "Tobin's Marginal q and Average q: A Neoclassical Interpretation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(1), pages 213-224, January.
    18. Jason G. Cummins & Kevin A. Hassett & R. Glenn Hubbard, 1994. "A Reconsideration of Investment Behavior Using Tax Reforms as Natural Experiments," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 25(2), pages 1-74.
    19. Luigi L. Pasinetti, 1966. "Paradoxes in Capital Theory: A Symposium: Changes in the Rate of Profit and Switches of Techniques," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 80(4), pages 503-517.
    20. Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2011. "Rethinking Macroeconomics: What Failed, And How To Repair It," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(4), pages 591-645, August.
    21. Bond, Stephen & Xing, Jing, 2015. "Corporate taxation and capital accumulation: Evidence from sectoral panel data for 14 OECD countries," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 15-31.
    22. Mark E. Doms & Timothy Dunne, 1998. "Capital Adjustment Patterns in Manufacturing Plants," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 1(2), pages 409-429, April.
    23. Kenneth J. Arrow & B. Douglas Bernheim & Martin S. Feldstein & Daniel L. McFadden & James M. Poterba & Robert M. Solow, 2011. "100 Years of the American Economic Review : The Top 20 Articles," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(1), pages 1-8, February.
    24. M. J. Gordon, 1992. "The Neoclassical and a Post Keynesian Theory of Investment," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(4), pages 425-443, July.
    25. Dale W. Jorgenson, 1972. "Investment Behavior and the Production Function," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 3(1), pages 220-251, Spring.
    26. James R. Crotty, 1992. "Neoclassical and Keynesian Approaches to the Theory of Investment," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(4), pages 483-496, July.
    27. Robert E. Hall, 2004. "Measuring Factor Adjustment Costs," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 119(3), pages 899-927.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Daniele Girardi & Riccardo Pariboni, 2019. "Normal utilization as the adjusting variable in Neo‐Kaleckian growth models: A critique," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 70(2), pages 341-358, May.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gourio, Francois & Kashyap, Anil K, 2007. "Investment spikes: New facts and a general equilibrium exploration," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(Supplemen), pages 1-22, September.
    2. Simon Gilchrist & Egon Zakrajsek, 2007. "Investment and the Cost of Capital: New Evidence from the Corporate Bond Market," NBER Working Papers 13174, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Eran Yashiv, 2016. "Capital Values and Job Values," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 19, pages 190-209, January.
    4. Lu Zhang, 2017. "The Investment CAPM," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 23(4), pages 545-603, September.
    5. Jean-Bernard Chatelain, 2003. "Structural modelling of financial constraints on investment: where do we stand?," Chapters, in: Paul Butzen & Catherine Fuss (ed.), Firms’ Investment and Finance Decisions, chapter 2, pages 40-58, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    6. Fabio Verona, 2014. "Investment Dynamics with Information Costs," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(8), pages 1627-1656, December.
    7. Cummins, Jason G. & Hassett, Kevin A. & Hubbard, R. Glenn, 1996. "Tax reforms and investment: A cross-country comparison," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(1-2), pages 237-273, October.
    8. Smith, James, 2008. "That elusive elasticity and the ubiquitous bias: Is panel data a panacea?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 760-779, June.
    9. Coulibaly Brahima & Millar Jonathan N., 2011. "The "Elusive" Capital-User Cost Elasticity Revisited," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 11(1), pages 1-41, September.
    10. Guiying Laura Wu, 2015. "Investment Frictions and the Aggregate Output Loss in China," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 77(3), pages 437-465, June.
    11. Nadja Dwenger, 2014. "User Cost Elasticity of Capital Revisited," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 81(321), pages 161-186, January.
    12. Hyun-Euy Kim, 2007. "The Interest Rate Channel of Monetary Transmission under Low Inflation in Korea (in Korean)," Economic Analysis (Quarterly), Economic Research Institute, Bank of Korea, vol. 13(1), pages 1-56, March.
    13. Caggese, Andrea, 2007. "Testing financing constraints on firm investment using variable capital," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(3), pages 683-723, December.
    14. Jean-Bernard Chatelain, 2002. "Structural modelling of investment and financial constraints: Where do we stand?," Working Paper Research 28, National Bank of Belgium.
    15. Lewe, Stefan, 2003. "Wachstumseffiziente Unternehmensbesteuerung," Publications of Darmstadt Technical University, Institute for Business Studies (BWL) 20042, Darmstadt Technical University, Department of Business Administration, Economics and Law, Institute for Business Studies (BWL).
    16. Enrico Sergio Levrero, 2021. "Estimates of the Natural Rate of Interest and the Stance of Monetary Policies: A Critical Assessment," International Journal of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(1), pages 5-27, February.
    17. Yashiv, Eran, 2015. "Capital values and job values," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 86323, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    18. Kaoru Hosono & Masaki Hotei & Daisuke Miyakawa, 2023. "Causal effects of a tax incentive on SME capital investment," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 61(2), pages 539-557, August.
    19. Robert S. Chirinko & Steven M. Fazzari & Andrew P. Meyer, 2004. "That Elusive Elasticity: A Long-Panel Approach to Estimating the Capital-Labor Substitution Elasticity," CESifo Working Paper Series 1240, CESifo.
    20. Marcela Eslava & John Haltiwanger & Adriana Kugler & Maurice Kugler, 2010. "Factor Adjustments after Deregulation: Panel Evidence from Colombian Plants," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(2), pages 378-391, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    investment; neoclassical theory; Wicksell; Jorgenson; Fisher; adjustment-costs;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B22 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought since 1925 - - - Macroeconomics
    • E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity
    • B13 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Neoclassical through 1925 (Austrian, Marshallian, Walrasian, Wicksellian)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ums:papers:2017-03. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Daniele Girardi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deumaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.