IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpot/0404007.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Irreversible investment under interest rate variability: new results

Author

Listed:
  • Luis H.R. Alvarez

    (Department of Economics, Quantitative Methods in Management, Turku School of Economics & Business Administration)

  • Erkki Koskela

    (Department of Economics, University of Helsinki & Bank of Finland)

Abstract

The current literature on irreversible investment decisions usually makes the assumption of a constant interest rate. We study the impact of interest rate and revenue variability on the decision to carry out an irreversible investment project. Given the generality of the valuation problem considered, we first provide a thorough mathematical characterization of the two-dimensional optimal stopping problem and develop some new results. We establish that interest rate variability has a profound decelerating or accelerating impact on investment demand depending on whether the current interest rate is below or above the long run steady state interest rate, and that its quantitative size may be very large. Allowing for interest rate uncertainty is shown to decelerate rational investment demand by raising both the required exercise premium of the irreversible investment opportunity and the value of waiting. Finally, we demonstrate that increased revenue volatility strengthens the negative impact of interest rate uncertainty and vice versa.

Suggested Citation

  • Luis H.R. Alvarez & Erkki Koskela, 2004. "Irreversible investment under interest rate variability: new results," Others 0404007, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpot:0404007
    Note: Type of Document - pdf
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/othr/papers/0404/0404007.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yaozhong Hu & Bernt Øksendal, 1998. "Optimal time to invest when the price processes are geometric Brownian motions," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 2(3), pages 295-310.
    2. ,, 1998. "Problems And Solutions," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(5), pages 687-698, October.
    3. Andrew B. Abel & Janice C. Eberly, 1996. "Optimal Investment with Costly Reversibility," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 63(4), pages 581-593.
    4. Ingersoll, Jonathan E, Jr & Ross, Stephen A, 1992. "Waiting to Invest: Investment and Uncertainty," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(1), pages 1-29, January.
    5. Ioannis Karatzas & Fridrik M. Baldursson, 1996. "Irreversible investment and industry equilibrium (*)," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 69-89.
    6. Michel Demers, 1991. "Investment under Uncertainty, Irreversibility and the Arrival of Information Over Time," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 58(2), pages 333-350.
    7. Samuel Bentolila & Giuseppe Bertola, 1990. "Firing Costs and Labour Demand: How Bad is Eurosclerosis?," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 57(3), pages 381-402.
    8. Pindyck, Robert S., 2000. "Irreversibilities and the timing of environmental policy," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(3), pages 233-259, July.
    9. Caballero, Ricardo J, 1991. "On the Sign of the Investment-Uncertainty Relationship," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(1), pages 279-288, March.
    10. L. Wade, 1988. "Review," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 58(1), pages 99-100, July.
    11. Huntley Schaller & Fanny Demers & Michel Demers, 1993. "Investments Under Uncertainty and Irreversibility," Carleton Economic Papers 93-10, Carleton University, Department of Economics, revised Sep 1990.
    12. Stephen Nickell, 1974. "On the Role of Expectations in the Pure Theory of Investment," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 41(1), pages 1-19.
    13. Dixit, Avinash K, 1989. "Entry and Exit Decisions under Uncertainty," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(3), pages 620-638, June.
    14. Pindyck, Robert S, 1991. "Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Investment," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 29(3), pages 1110-1148, September.
    15. ,, 1998. "Problems And Solutions," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(3), pages 381-386, June.
    16. ,, 1998. "Problems And Solutions," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(4), pages 525-537, August.
    17. Kenneth J. Arrow & Anthony C. Fisher, 1974. "Environmental Preservation, Uncertainty, and Irreversibility," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Chennat Gopalakrishnan (ed.), Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics, chapter 4, pages 76-84, Palgrave Macmillan.
    18. Guiseppe Bertola & Ricardo J. Caballero, 1994. "Irreversibility and Aggregate Investment," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 61(2), pages 223-246.
    19. Ben S. Bernanke, 1983. "Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Cyclical Investment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 98(1), pages 85-106.
    20. Cukierman, Alex, 1980. "The Effects of Uncertainty on Investment under Risk Neutrality with Endogenous Information," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 88(3), pages 462-475, June.
    21. Pindyck, Robert S, 1988. "Irreversible Investment, Capacity Choice, and the Value of the Firm," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(5), pages 969-985, December.
    22. Alvarez, Luis H. R. & Koskela, Erkki, 2005. "Wicksellian theory of forest rotation under interest rate variability," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 529-545, March.
    23. ,, 1998. "Problems And Solutions," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(2), pages 285-292, April.
    24. Henry, Claude, 1974. "Investment Decisions Under Uncertainty: The "Irreversibility Effect."," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(6), pages 1006-1012, December.
    25. ,, 1998. "Problems And Solutions," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 14(1), pages 151-159, February.
    26. Avinash K. Dixit & Robert S. Pindyck, 1994. "Investment under Uncertainty," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 5474.
    27. Robert C. Merton, 1975. "An Asymptotic Theory of Growth Under Uncertainty," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 42(3), pages 375-393.
    28. Caballero, Ricardo J., 1999. "Aggregate investment," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 12, pages 813-862, Elsevier.
    29. Nicole El Karoui & Monique Jeanblanc‐Picquè & Steven E. Shreve, 1998. "Robustness of the Black and Scholes Formula," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(2), pages 93-126, April.
    30. Nickell, Stephen J, 1974. "On Expectations, Government Policy and the Rate of Investment," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 41(163), pages 241-255, August.
    31. Anders ûksendal, 2000. "Irreversible investment problems," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 223-250.
    32. Brennan, Michael J & Schwartz, Eduardo S, 1985. "Evaluating Natural Resource Investments," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 58(2), pages 135-157, April.
    33. Robert McDonald & Daniel Siegel, 1986. "The Value of Waiting to Invest," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 101(4), pages 707-727.
    34. Sarkar, Sudipto, 2000. "On the investment-uncertainty relationship in a real options model," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 219-225, February.
    35. Bertola, Giuseppe, 1998. "Irreversible investment," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(1), pages 3-37, March.
    36. Baldwin, Carliss Y, 1982. "Optimal Sequential Investment When Capital Is Not Readily Reversible," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 37(3), pages 763-782, June.
    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. Alvarez, Luis H. R. & Koskela, Erkki, 2005. "Wicksellian theory of forest rotation under interest rate variability," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 529-545, March.
    2. Zhang, Ran & Xu, Shuang, 2014. "Optimal stopping time with stochastic volatility," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 319-328.
    3. Nesrine Dardouri & Abdelkader Aguir & Ramzi Farhani & Mounir Smida, 2023. "Revisiting the Determinants of Investment- The Case of Tunisia," Post-Print hal-04101430, HAL.
    4. Faris Alshubiri, 2022. "The Impact of the Real Interest Rate, the Exchange Rate and Political Stability on Foreign Direct Investment Inflows: A Comparative Analysis of G7 and GCC Countries," Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, Springer;Japanese Association of Financial Economics and Engineering, vol. 29(3), pages 569-603, September.

    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. Luis H. R. Alvarez & Erkki Koskela, 2006. "Irreversible Investment under Interest Rate Variability: Some Generalizations," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 79(2), pages 623-644, March.
    2. Alvarez, Luis H.R., 2011. "Optimal capital accumulation under price uncertainty and costly reversibility," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 35(10), pages 1769-1788, October.
    3. Luis Alvarez, 2010. "Irreversible capital accumulation under interest rate uncertainty," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 72(2), pages 249-271, October.
    4. Pindyck, Robert S, 1991. "Irreversibility, Uncertainty, and Investment," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 29(3), pages 1110-1148, September.
    5. Jérôme Bourdieu & Benoît Coeuré & Béatrice Sédillot, 1997. "Investissement, incertitude et irréversibilité. Quelques développements récents de la théorie de l'investissement," Revue Économique, Programme National Persée, vol. 48(1), pages 23-53.
    6. Hanno Dihle, 2015. "Real Options in a Ramsey style Growth Model," Discussion Paper Series 32, Department of International Economic Policy, University of Freiburg, revised Dec 2015.
    7. Luis H.R. Alvarez E., 2006. "Irreversible Investment, Incremental Capital Accumulation, and Price Uncertainty," Discussion Papers 4, Aboa Centre for Economics.
    8. Robert S. Pindyck & Andrés Solimano, 1993. "Economic Instability and Aggregate Investment," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1993, Volume 8, pages 259-318, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Tsekrekos, Andrianos E., 2010. "The effect of mean reversion on entry and exit decisions under uncertainty," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 725-742, April.
    10. Nicholas Bloom & John Van Reenen, 2002. "Patents, Real Options and Firm Performance," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(478), pages 97-116, March.
    11. Lander, Diane M. & Pinches, George E., 1998. "Challenges to the Practical Implementation of Modeling and Valuing Real Options," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 38(3, Part 2), pages 537-567.
    12. Kogan, Leonid, 2001. "An equilibrium model of irreversible investment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 201-245, November.
    13. Bulan, Laarni & Mayer, Christopher & Somerville, C. Tsuriel, 2009. "Irreversible investment, real options, and competition: Evidence from real estate development," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(3), pages 237-251, May.
    14. Davis, Graham A. & Cairns, Robert D., 2017. "The odd notion of “reversible investment”," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 172-180.
    15. El-Shazly Alaa, 2004. "Investment Under Uncertainty in Egypt: A Real-Options Approach," Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, De Gruyter, vol. 2(2), pages 51-60, August.
    16. Hui Wang, 2005. "A Sequential Entry Problem with Forced Exits," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 30(2), pages 501-520, May.
    17. Raj Chetty, 2004. "Interest Rates and Backward-Bending Investment," NBER Working Papers 10354, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Jonathan B. Berk, 1999. "A Simple Approach for Deciding When to Invest," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(5), pages 1319-1326, December.
    19. Richard Hartman & Michael Hendrickson, 1999. "Optimal Partially Reversible Investment," Discussion Papers in Economics at the University of Washington 0032, Department of Economics at the University of Washington.
    20. Jonathan B. Berk, 1998. "A Simple Approach for Deciding When to Invest," NBER Working Papers 6678, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    irreversible investment; variable interest rates; free boundary problems;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q23 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation - - - Forestry
    • G31 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Capital Budgeting; Fixed Investment and Inventory Studies
    • C61 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling - - - Optimization Techniques; Programming Models; Dynamic Analysis

    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:wpa:wuwpot:0404007. 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: EconWPA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    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.