The emphasis of capital theory in recent decades has moved away from the implications of useful life as an important economic variable and has turned on the microeconomic and macroeconomic consequences of investment irreversibilities. Thus the voluminous literature that has developed ignores the marked difference be-tween replacement and scrapping and glosses over their significant implications for microeconomic and aggregate dynamics. This paper highlights the gains in explana-tory power that result when useful life, replacement and scrapping are placed in the center of the analysis. It does so by considering an economy with two representative firms that differ only in that the one applies replacement and the other scrapping. Among other interesting findings, at the microeconomic level it turns out that the de-mand for replacement investment is not invariant with respect to the type of capital policy being applied, whereas at the macroeconomic level it is shown that we cannot obtain consistent aggregates of capital stock and replacement investment.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Macroeconomics with number
0504029.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: